Learning from Las Vegas

Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy when it was first published in 1972. The book asked architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of common people and less immodest in their erections of heroic, self-aggrandizing monuments. This revision includes the full texts of Part I of the original, on the Las Vegas strip, and Part II, Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed—a generalization from the findings of the first part on symbolism in architecture and the iconography of urban sprawl. (The final part of the first edition, on the architectural work of the firm Venturi and Rauch, is not included in the revision. )