ABSTRACT
Gaming, as the gambling industry prefers to call gambling, is rapidly becoming a popular cultural phenomenon that not only increasingly influences trends in family leisure, but also represents one strand of postmodern cultural production that has thus far remained undertheorized. This situation is especially odd when one considers that our understanding of postmodernist architecture took a major step forward in the work of Venturi, Brown, and Izenour when they first began to theorize the landscape of Las Vegas as an American vernacular style that existed outside of Europeanized modernist systems of architecture. 1 Though they tended to focus more on Vegas's non-casino buildings and features than the casinos themselves, they were able to make a convincing argument that Vegas was structured as a system based specifically on the sign—both literally and in a structuralist sense—that announced the function and meaning of buildings from the vantage point of the road—specifically, the multi-lane roads of Vegas's famed Strip. That this conception of Vegas architecture has expanded to form a major tenant of what we call postmodern architecture is now a given. Postmodernist architects genuflect to this concept of architecture as a counterpoint not only to a modernist high art approach to architecture, but also to a subtle reading of the way in which mass-produced vernacular architecture has already changed the way that US cities look and feel via the use of theming. That Vegas is already, then, a postmodern playground for architecture need not be disputed. That we need a theoretical approach to understand how to explain the changes in the morphologies of this postmodernism is another problem altogether. The current challenge posed by Vegas is twofold: on the one hand, it may well have morphed into an island of new postmodern architectural experimentation that has, at least for the moment, outstripped the prevailing theories that we have for analyzing postmodern architecture; it has also, in its post-1970s emphasis on family theming, posed an alternative to the Disney paradigm that is, finally, simply another kind of architectural form completely. The actual existence of the newer postmodern casinos, in other words, resist both the theories of “contradiction” upon which postmodern architectural theory is largely based, and the analysis of themed environments coming out of cultural studies. Perhaps Vegas architecture has, to some extent, always been its own model. Certainly, its latest incarnations, like the casino owner's designs in general, are a disorienting experience.
