Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour and Denise Scott-Brown, A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning From Las Vegas (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1972), 3-73.
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown present an analysis of the method of communication in architecture as space, symbol and persuasion in the text “Learning From Las Vegas.” In an attempt to gain insight, the authors look back towards history to make sense of the present with a critique of the modernist aversions to communication of form through references to the past and the tendencies to create form derived from program and structure.
A reflection on the sacredness of space shared by modernist theorists spurs Venturi and Scott-Brown to study the rejection of space held sacred by the modernists in the communication dominated, antispacial signs and landscape of Las Vegas, where the signs become the architecture. The authors believe modern architects are blind to the value of representational architecture along highways, which becomes the focus of discussion within the text. Venturi and Scott-Brown believe this aversion to dominated communication stems from an objection to signs in buildings, where modernists believe the plan should speak for itself.
The manipulation of signage as direction is first presented through a sense of scale and space, with parking lots at the front to reassure and draw in would be patrons. This is coupled with a description of texture as signage, where the space between the highway and the shed utilises texture to direct the user to the casino with its paving patterns, parking lines, curbs and borders that form points of identity over the vast asphalt landscape.
Venturi and Scott Brown herald the highway sign as the unifying aspect, managing to visually and verbally communicate the meaning and program of the space within a few seconds from afar a distance, becoming the basis of their theory of the ‘decorated shed’. This presented a landscape dominated by symbol, so much so that the architecture came secondary to the sign, or in some cases as seen in the “long island duckling” where the building became sign, a sculptural symbol of its program.
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