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Whitney, told the curators that they would not
be
admitted onto the floors
during the process of installation; and he had vested in Venturi the power of
presenting these works to the public. Venturi was determined to do this in
his own way. The premises which serve as foundations for that way are what
concern
me
here.
Sprinkled throughout
Learning from Las Vegas
are disclaimers of in–
terest in the human content of the authors' subject:
Las
Vegas is analyzed here only as a phenomenon of architectural com–
munication. Just as an analysis of the structure of a Gothic cathedral
need not include a debate on the morality of medieval religion, so
Las
Vegas's values are not questioned here . The morality of commercial ad–
~ertising,
gambling interests, and the competitive instinct is not at
ISSue.
Yet the book is filled with deductions about the nature of space appropriate
to contemporary society, derived from the structure of one of the gambling
capitals of the world.
In analyzing Las Vegas, Venturi finds that its environment is antispatial
("the dominance of signs over space" ), antistructural ("the graphic sign in
space has become the architecture of this landscape"), and antitemporal
("time is limitless, because the light of noon and midnight are exactly the
same") . If this environment produces any psychological effects, Venturi is
not really interested for, as he has said, his aim is not to pass judgments.
Only once does he allow a remark on the effect induced by the big casino:
The intricate maze under the low ceiling never connects with outside
light or outside space. This disorients the occupant in space and time.
He loses track ofwhere he is and when it is.
That the builders of the Vegas casinos should have constructed an en–
vironment perfectly suited to the needs of their occupants is hardly surpris–
ing. Nor is it news that those requirements should
be
disorientation with re–
gard to space and time. In the essays that comprise his
Paris-Capital ofthe
19th Century,
Walter Benjamin describes the spread of gambling within the
middle class in the 1850s and 1860s equating the game of chance with the
procedures of the factory assembly line. Both result in a destruction of time,
or at least the purposive nature of psychological time, in that both involve
repeated actions fundamentally severed from the ones that preceed or follow
them. Benjamin writes:
Gambling even contains the workman's gesture that is produced by the
automatic operation, for there can be no game without the quick move-
