ABSTRACT
Over twenty-six years ago Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour packed up their suitcases and drawing boards and literally took their Yale design studio ‘on the road’ to that famous conglomeration of neon frontages in the Nevada desert. The book resulting from that trip, Learning from Las Vegas (1972), was instrumental in persuading critics to turn their attention to the over-scale signs that grace the ‘decorated sheds’ of the Las Vegas landscape and to re-evaluate their function in the construction of urban space and place. In the years following the publication of that classic work urban critics have also become more aware that not only do theorists and theory ‘travel’, so too do places, and that ‘Las Vegas’ designates both a particular urban site in the Nevada desert and also an ‘imaginary-real’ place dispersed across the globe through various cultural technologies and texts. The ubiquitousness of that dispersal of place inspired Paul Virilio (1991a: 26) to suggest in 1980 that perhaps today we should be looking to Hollywood films about Las Vegas for clues to the nature of contemporary urbanism, rather than travelling to Las Vegas itself.
