Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > Learning from Las Vegas' and Los Angeles and Re...
View graph of relations

Learning from Las Vegas' and Los Angeles and Reyner Banham

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>1/06/2003
<mark>Journal</mark>Visible Language
Issue number3
Volume37
Number of pages17
Pages (from-to)314 -330
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

The influential British architectural historian and theorist Reyner Banham (1922-1988) belonged to the same generation as Robert Venturi (b.1925) and Denise Scott Brown (b.1931) and shared many of their architectural values. This essay shows the great similarities of value and outlook in Learning from Las Vegas and Banham’s almost contemporaneous Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971). It then pinpoints areas of disagreement between Venturi et al. and Banham and moves to a discussion of the different authors’ views on Las Vegas, drawing on other texts written by Banham around this time. It reveals that the Venturi et al. version of Las Vegas’s significance was not the only one in currency in the period when Learning from Las Vegas appeared in its first and second editions, and that the different interpretations of Las Vegas reveal contested architectural values during the period when Modernist values were being challenged by Post-Modern ones. - See more at: http://visiblelanguagejournal.com/articles/article/493/#sthash.eaCWpQk4.dpuf

Bibliographic note

This article is another example of Whiteley's primary research concern with changing cultural values in the visual arts in the second half of the twentieth century and their relationship to today. The article was published in Visible Language ('an independent scholarly journal published continuously since 1967') that is 'concerned with research and ideas that help define the unique role and properties of written language' 'Learning'' provides historical and critical understanding of the changing cultural interpretations of Las Vegas and Los Angeles from the mid-1960s to the 1980s. His article has been selected for a multi-authored booke published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2008 on the changing identity and diverse meanings of Las Vegas. Reyner Banham belonged to the same generation as Robert Venturi (b.1925) and Denise Scott Brown (b.1931) and shared many of their architectural values. This article shows the great similarities of value and outlook in Learning from Las Vegas and Banham's almost contemporaneous Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971). It then pinpoints areas of disagreement between Venturi et al. and Banham and moves to a discussion of the different authors' views on Las Vegas, drawing on other texts written by Banham around this time. It reveals that the Venturi et al. version of Las Vegas's significance was not the only one in currency in the period when Learning from Las Vegas appeared in its first and second editions, and that the different interpretations of Las Vegas reveal contested architectural values during the period when Modernist values were being challenged by Post-Modern ones RAE_import_type : Journal article RAE_uoa_type : LICA