The unlikely parallel between Rome’s eternal architecture and the Las Vegas Strip
What is the curious connection between America’s gaudy Sin City and the Old World’s Eternal City? The devil is in the details, as two books published half a century apart reveal.
Las Vegas is feared and loathed as possibly the kitschiest place on Earth. But on a recent trip to Sin City, a designer reminded me that there’s wisdom to be gleaned from this desert madhouse. This is thanks to architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, who in 1972 published Learning from Las Vegas, a book that sought to upend classist urban design and architecture sensibilities. “Las Vegas is to the strip what Rome is to the piazza,” they wrote.
More recently, the US city has captured the attention of Iwan Baan, one of the world’s leading architecture photographers. The Dutch snapper, in partnership with Zürich’s Lars Müller Publishers, released a tongue-in-cheek book, Rome–Las Vegas: Bread and Circuses, exploring the relationship between the two cities. His street photography from both cities is laid out across its pages, often side by side. The comparison might seem preposterous. Rome, after all, is known as the Eternal City for a good reason. In Vegas, almost all of the buildings photographed 50 years earlier by Scott Brown and Venturi have already been replaced by gaudier versions.
Today on the Strip, pavements swerve in and out of casinos and shopping malls as pedestrians are subjected to terrible music. It feels far from the dolce vita. But Baan, like Scott Brown and Venturi before him, has a point: the two cities have striking similarities. Both have Disney-esque streets, flip-flop-wearing tourists and Doric columns. In Rome, some of my favourite details are modern touches fashioned to appear as though they were hundreds of years old. Take the Bose speakers inside St Peter’s Cathedral, carefully painted to resemble marble.
Scott Brown and Venturi wanted readers to be open-minded, appreciating that while cities are often not the utopias that planners hope for, they are the places where we learn how people actually use urban spaces. The 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 pondered whether this was exactly what the Romans would have devised, had they been asked to envision 21st-century architecture. They might also have ordered a margarita and headed to the blackjack table.
