A fascimile edition of the long-out-of-print large-format edition designed by design icon Muriel Cooper.
Upon its publication by the MIT Press in 1972, Learning from Las Vegas was immediately influential and controversial. The authors made an argument that was revolutionary for its time―that the billboards and casinos of Las Vegas were worthy of architectural attention―and offered a challenge for contemporary architects obsessed with the heroic and monumental. The physical book itself, designed by MIT's iconic designer Muriel Cooper, was hailed as a masterpiece of modernist design, but the book's design struck the authors as too monumental for a text that praised the ugly and ordinary over the heroic and monumental. The MIT Press published a revised version in 1977―a modest paperback that the authors felt was more in keeping with the argument of the book―and the original Cooper-designed book fell out of print and became a highly sought-after collectors' item; it now sells for thousands of dollars in the rare book market, while the author-redesigned paperback has remained continuously in print at a price affordable to students. Now, decades after the original hardcover edition sold out, the MIT Press is publishing a facsimile edition of the original large-format Cooper-designed edition of Learning from Las Vegas, complete with translucent glassine wrap. This edition also features a spirited preface by Denise Scott Brown, looking back on the creation of the book and explaining her and Robert Venturi's reservations about the original design.
Learning from Las Vegas begins with the Las Vegas Strip and proceeds to "Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed," on symbolism in architecture and the iconography of urban sprawl. As Scott Brown says in her introduction, the book “upended sacred cows … would not bad-mouth bad taste, and redefined architectural research.”

Learning from Las Vegas, facsimile edition (Mit Press)

Arts & Photography

Venturi, Robert

Brown, Denise Scott

Izenour, Steven

Architecture

The MIT Press

The reissue of a classic MIT Press title first published almost thirty years ago tracing the theme and variations in the architecture of the White Tower hamburger chain and recapturing a nearly forgotten piece of American history.
Today's dominant fast-food franchises spend millions to persuade us that they do it all for us, that we can have it our way. White Tower, the pioneering hamburger chain founded in 1926, never felt the need for this kind of advertising; it depended on its instantly recognizable building to say it all. Those gleaming white (“clean”), well-lighted (“always open”), streamlined (“fast and efficient”), human-scaled (“friendly”) structures were three-dimensional billboards for their franchise, capped by an actual white tower often redundantly labeled, in bold graphics, “White Tower.” This was branding before the age of branding. The photographs in this classic book not only trace the evolution of a restaurant chain, they record an iconography of a part of the American built environment that no longer exists. In an approach very much in the spirit of Learning from Las Vegas, by Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, architects Paul Hirshorn and Steven Izenour have selected photographs taken in a variety of styles―from the stark and deadpan to family album-like snapshots. In an affectionately written introductory essay, Hirshorn and Izenour describe the identifiable and idiosyncratic commercial architectural style of the 1930s and 1940s and document the development of the White Tower buildings and their stylistic variations. Their conversations with former White Tower employees―including Charles Johnson, White Tower's architect for over forty years―are the source of many telling quotations and entertaining captions that set their analysis of the buildings within a broader story of corporate culture, mass marketing, and the rise of franchising in the twentieth century.

White Towers (Mit Press)

Hirshorn, Paul

MIT Press]

Down by the Seaside: Views from Americas Past (Past Age Postcard Series)

Natl Trust for Historic

L'enseignement de Las Vegas: Essai (French Edition)

Scott Brown, Robert

Mardaga

Ausgangspunkt für diese Veröffentlichung, die sich schon lange zu einem Klassiker der Architekturtheorie entwickelt hat, war ein Seminar mit dem Titel «Learning from Las Vegas, or Form Analysis as Design Research» an der Fakultät für Kunst und Architektur der Yale University 1968.

Lernen von Las Vegas: Zur Ikonographie und Architektursymbolik der Geschäftsstadt (Bauwelt Fundamente, 53) (German Edition)

Brown, Denise S.

Birkhauser

Aprendiendo de Las Vegas: El simbolismo olvidado de la forma arquitectónica

Reference

Scott Brown, Denise

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Editorial Gustavo Gili, S.L.

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