ABSTRACT
We have written, in Learning from Las Vegas, of our propensity as architects for modest architecture based at first on necessity, on our experience as a little firm with small jobs and limited budgets, then on an intuition that our situation had a general significance, and finally on a conviction that ours is not an era for heroic or pure architectural statements. Rhetoric for our landscape, when it is appropriate, will come from a less formal and more symbolic medium than pure architecture-perhaps from combinations of signs and sculpture and moving lights which decorate and represent. The source for our fancy architecture is in the conventions of the commercial strip. Its prototype is not the spatial Baroque monument, but the Early Christian basilica, that plain barn smothered in frescoes, the decorated shed par excellence. Ours is also not an era for expensive buildings: Our national budgets do not support the architectural glories of a Parthenon or a Chartres, our collective heart is not in architecture, our collective values direct us in other paths, sometimes social, often military, and our technology and our labor systems promote standard systems of conventional construction.
