Star System

It was the fall of 1966, as the Las Vegas Strip was just beginning to sparkle and sprawl, when a young architect and planning professor by the name of Denise Scott Brown invited her friend Robert Venturi on a weekend road trip to the desert. The pair rented a car in Los Angeles, where Scott Brown was teaching urban design at UCLA, and drove east toward Nevada. As the Strip’s burgeoning silhouette came into view, Scott Brown, who carried a camera everywhere she went, had a sudden vision. Three structures jutted up from the landscape in the distance: the Dunes hotel and casino, all glass and crisp angles; the Dunes’ enormous spade-shaped sign, almost as tall as the casino itself; and a lone, rugged-looking chimney. They pulled over alongside a gravelly, cactus-y patch of ground and Scott Brown styled a pair of photographs. She positioned Venturi, dressed in a boxy suit, with his back to the camera and to the right of the three structures. Click. Then she gave Venturi her camera and placed herself in the foreground of the same three structures, facing the lens, hands on hips and legs wide, smiling like a Cheshire cat. 

Click. 

She had already been to Vegas a few times by herself, drawn to its neon and billboards, guided by her instinct to pay attention to city spaces overlooked, and looked down on, by her peers. Scott Brown thought Vegas was fun—unlike a lot of modern design at that time—and she wanted to capture this sense of delight. So she played with distance and scale in the camera lens and styled Venturi to look like a fourth “tower” on the skyline, and herself like a triumphant skyline conqueror. 

Scott Brown and Venturi married eight months after that road trip, at a ceremony on the front porch of Scott Brown’s bungalow in Santa Monica. Five years after that, they copublished Learning from Las Vegas, one of the most influential design books of the twentieth century. Dense, theoretical, provocative, and funny, it established the simple yet profound idea that architecture communicates. A building is not merely “a machine for living in,” as the Swiss French modernist architect Le Corbusier famously put it, but a canvas to interpret, a scene in a story. Translated into sixteen languages, and reprinted twenty-nine times to date, it remains a standard text across design and fine arts departments. Scott Brown both disagreed with and admired her early modernist predecessors, who had been obsessed with the question of architectural function, and had made an art of designing buildings to efficiently perform specific purposes, like housing a family or sheltering workers. Learning from Las Vegas’s essential insight was that communication was an architectural function too. Buildings convey meaning, which everyone reads—just as Scott Brown did on that festive, fecund desert journey, when she saw three faraway buildings and felt a sense of joy and play. She turned the Vegas skyline into a sentence in the unfolding story of her new romance.