ABSTRACT
This chapter is focused on uncovering the relationship between scientific fieldwork and
repressed sexuality in Learning from Las Vegas. Fieldwork is especially significant in
Learning from Las Vegas because that work set out to use scientific methods and tech-
niques to provoke a revolution in architecture. Fieldwork is also central to two similarly
important types of revolution that shaped Learning from Las Vegas. The first is Thomas
Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions, proposed in the 1960s for understanding how
change is promoted in a discipline. The second is the sexual revolution, which became
widespread in the 1960s and which drew some of its inspiration from the fieldwork of
anthropologist Margaret Mead. The chapter revisits the fieldwork undertaken for Learn-
ing from Las Vegas in 1968 and questions both its objectivity and its ambivalent and
inconsistent attitude towards gender and sexuality. As a key component of this investi-
gation, the chapter adopts the anthropological notion of the ‘erotics of fieldwork’ to illu-
minate these previously ignored dimensions in Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour’s
work.
