“People like you only come to Las Vegas ironically,” a new acquaintance told me at the bar of the Plaza Hotel & Casino. I was mid-sip of my salt-rimmed margarita and I assumed that he was pigeonholing me based on my knee-length skirt, overwhelmed expression and scant enthusiasm for blackjack. I did indeed spend most of my Vegas sojourn trying to remember why exactly I had decided to come; the city is feared and loathed for being possibly the kitschiest place on earth but designers know that there is wisdom to be gleaned from this desert madhouse. That’s thanks to architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, who dragged a class of Yale students to Sin City on a research trip that resulted in the 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas. The duo sought to upend classist urban design and architecture sensibilities with their work. “Las Vegas is to the strip what Rome is to the piazza,” they said.
Photographer Iwan Baan’s tongue-in-cheek new book, Rome – Las Vegas: Bread and Circuses, published by Lars Müller Publishers, explores this relationship. The title is an expansion of a 2022 exhibition held at Rome’s American Institute and presents street photographs taken by Baan on trips to the two cities, often laid out side by side. The comparison might seem preposterous. Rome, after all, is nicknamed the Eternal City for a good reason. In Las Vegas, virtually all the buildings photographed 50 years earlier by Venturi and Scott Brown have already been replaced by gaudier versions of themselves. Today, on the main drag of the Strip, the pavement swerves in and out of casinos and shopping malls, while pedestrians are subjected to bad music. Let me assure you: it feels far from the dolce vita. But Baan, like Venturi and Scott Brown before him, has a point. In the frame, the two cities are strikingly similar. Both have the same Disneyfied streets, flip-flop-wearing tourists and Doric columns. In Rome, some of my favourite details are the modern touches disguised to appear as though they were there many hundreds of years ago. Take the Bose speakers inside Saint Peter’s Cathedral, which have been carefully painted to resemble marble.
Scott Brown and Venturi wanted readers to be curious and open-minded, appreciating that while cities are often not the utopias planners idealise, they are where we can learn how people actually use urban spaces. The small similarities between the remarkable in Rome and the ready-made in Vegas are a reminder of this. On my last night in Sin City, I looked up at Caesars Palace – a 130-metre-tall casino and hotel topped with a pantheon – and had a strange thought. Had Romans been asked to envision architecture in the 21st century, perhaps this is exactly what they would have come up with. After all, they were the first to use concrete on a mass scale. I guess that a Roman might also have ordered a margarita and headed to the blackjack table.
Stella Roos is Monocle’s design correspondent. For more news and analysis,
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