Viva ‘Las Vegas’

In 1968, the architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown took a group of their students from the Yale School of Architecture on an expedition to Las Vegas to study the realities of contemporary American architecture. What they discovered, and documented, was spontaneous, messy, and commercial, built for cars and big signs. The resulting manifesto, Learning From Las Vegas, written with Steven Izenour and published in 1972, helped shift the focus of American architectural thought away from rigid Modernism to more varied points of view. Tonight Venturi and Scott Brown will present the keynote address at “Architecture After Las Vegas,” a major symposium on the legacy of this seminal work. The conference coincides with the exhibition What We Learned: The Yale Las Vegas Studio and the Work of Venturi Scott Brown & Associates, on view at the Yale School of Architecture Gallery through 5 February. “We may need these two architects as much now as ever,” declared New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff in his review of the show.

Michael Bierut and Yve Ludwig extend Pentagram’s series of posters for Yale Architecture, now in its twelfth year, with one that, like all the others, is primarily typographic and entirely black and white—but with a Rat Pack twist. Download a copy here.