More than four decades on, however, anyone setting foot on the Strip will soon realise – with relief or horror – that nobody remotely describable as a “tastemaker” has yet taken over. It gets them worrying: “What will happen to the Strip when the tastemakers take over?” But they also noted that, while the Strip originally “just grew”, they were seeing the emergence of “the usual building and zoning controls” and even a “Strip Beautification Committee”. “Las Vegas is to the Strip what Rome is to the Piazza,” the trio declared, having a grand old time enumerating the freakish architectural mini-movements that had emerged there, from “Miami Moroccan, International Jet Set Style” to “Yamasaki Bernini cum Roman Orgiastic” to “Bauhaus Hawaiian”. ‘Las Vegas is to the Strip what Rome is to the Piazza.’ Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian The repulsion eventually fuelled a great aesthetic controversy in 1972, when the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour published Learning from Las Vegas, which dared to approach the built environment of the Strip on its own terms. The dominance of this laissez-faire approach to architecture and urbanism produced, over the following decades, a flamboyant, unapologetic, gambling- and entertainment-driven pseudo-city that observers found compelling and repulsive in equal measure. Economic diversification always has been limited, so the attitude too often has been that if someone wants to build, unless it’s a real problem, let ’er rip!”Īnd rip it has. In the early 1930s, says Green, “the building of the Hoover Dam and the nascent tourism industry turned Las Vegas into a city dependent on federal projects and visitors. “For the most part, builders have been free to build as they please.” “It seems to me that urban planning has had nothing to do with the Strip,” says Michael Green, associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and co-author of Las Vegas: A Centennial History. Architect Robert Venturi in Las Vegas in 1966.
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