Architecture of Las Vegas

[1][2] They wrote, with Steven Izenour, a report in 1972 on the subject entitled Learning From Las Vegas: the Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form.

[3] They also drew a contrast between the artificially lit and air conditioned interiors of the buildings and the heat and glare of the "agoraphobic auto-scaled desert"[6] outside.

[3] The mixture of styles, ranging from what they termed "Miami Moroccan" to "Yamasaki Bernini cum Roman Orgiastic",[7] they did not view as chaotic but rather as a necessary result of Las Vegas as one of what they termed "the world's 'pleasure zones'" alongside the likes of Marienbad, the Alhambra, Disneyland, and Xanadu and its positioning as a place where a visitor with an ordinary life could indulge in escapist notions of being "a centurion at Caesar's Palace, a ranger at The Frontier, or a jetsetter at the Riviera"[8] for a few days.

[9] In the 1990s, Venturi and Scott Brown observed that the automotive-driven architecture of the 1960s had been transformed into a more pedestrianized form, in part as a result of the growth in visitors that it had experienced over the years.

[5][10] In their original book, and in the later 1977 revised edition, they had focussed upon characterizing Vegas in terms of how most if not all built objects in the (then) city in one way or another functioned as signage.