Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror

"For their seminal work Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour documented a sprawling postwar American city from a moving car. Martino Stierli examines their cinematic methodology against the background of contemporary photography and pop and conceptual art, including the work of artists Ed Ruscha and Stephen Shore, while highlighting Los Angeles as a cultural, urban, and architectural hot spot of the period. He considers how this approach relates to sociological theories and the phenomenology of urban spaces. He also sheds light on the polemics and controversies triggered by Learning from Las Vegas in architectural discourse and discusses them against models of high and low culture. Using both text and image, Stierli assesses the broad intellectual impact of this architectural manifesto and explains why the lessons from Learning from Las Vegas remain relevant for current debates in architecture and the arts." -- Publisher's description.