Learning from Las Vegas… and Los Angeles and Reyner Banham

Abstract

The influential British architectural historian and theorist Reyner Banham (1922-1988) belonged to the same generation as Robert Venturi (b.1925) and Denise Scott Brown (b.1931) and shared many of their architectural values. This essay shows the great similarities of value and outlook in Learning from Las Vegas and Banham’s almost contemporaneous Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971). It then pinpoints areas of disagreement between Venturi et al. and Banham and moves to a discussion of the different authors’ views on Las Vegas, drawing on other texts written by Banham around this time. It reveals that the Venturi et al. version of Las Vegas’s significance was not the only one in currency in the period when Learning from Las Vegas appeared in its first and second editions, and that the different interpretations of Las Vegas reveal contested architectural values during the period when Modernist values were being challenged by Post-Modern ones.