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Learning from the existing landscape is a way for an architect to be revolutionary. Not the obvious way, which is to tear down Paris and start over, as Le Corbusier suggested in the 20s, but a different and more tolerant way: that is, questioning the way we look at things.

The Commercial Strip, the Las Vegas Strip in particular—it's the example par excellence—challenges the architect to adopt a positive, non-frown attitude. Architects are not used to looking at their surroundings without making value judgements, because modern architecture is progressive, even revolutionary, utopian and purist; it is judgement, because modern
architecture is progressive, even revolutionary, utopian and purist; it is dissatisfied with the existing conditions. Modern architecture has been anything but permissive: architects have preferred to change the existing surroundings rather than reinforce what is there.

Architecture as space

Architects have been bewitched by a single element of the Italian landscape: the piazza. Its traditional, pedestrian-friendly and intricately enclosed spaces are easier to digest than the unrestrained spatial ramifications of Route 66 and Los Angeles. Architects have been raised with the Room, and the closed room is the easiest to handle. During the last forty years, theorists of modern architecture (sometimes with the exception of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier) have focused on space as the essential element that distinguishes architecture from painting, sculpture and literature. Their definitions celebrate this unique quality of the medium, and although sculpture and painting can sometimes be accorded spatial characteristics, a sculptural or pictorial architecture is unacceptable. This is because the room is sacred.

But some new critics have questioned how much content can really be extracted from abstract forms. Others have shown that the functionalists, despite their protestations, developed a formal vocabulary of their own, primarily inspired by contemporary art trends and industrial jargon;

late successors such as the Archigram group have, under similar protests, turned to pop art and the space industry. It's not just that

The philosophical associations of yarn eclecticism bring forth subtle and complex meanings to be savored in the docile space of the traditional landscape. The commercial persuasion of roadside eclecticism makes a bold impression in the complex environment of the new landscape, with its large spaces, high speeds and complex programs. Style and signs create connections between many different elements, distant and perceived at high speed. The message is crudely commercial, the context is fundamentally new.

Thirty years ago, a car driver could maintain a sense of spatial orientation. At the crossroads, a small sign with an arrow confirmed what he already knew. He knew where he was. Today, the road crossing is in the shape of a cloverleaf. In order to turn left, one must turn right, a contradiction that Allan D'Arcangelo clearly demonstrates. But the driver has no time to ponder the paradoxical subtleties of this dangerous and winding labyrinth. He relies on signs as signposts - gigantic signs in large spaces and high speeds.

The historical tradition and A&P

A&P's parking lot is a contemporary phase in the development of the great rooms since Versailles. The space that separates the highway with its high speed from the low, few buildings creates no containment and little direction. To move across a piazza is to move between tall enclosing forms. To move in this landscape is to move over a large expansive texture: the megatexture of the commercial landscape. The parking lot is the parterre of the asphalt landscape. The pattern of parking lines provides direction in the same way that paving, walkway edges, borders and tapis verts provide direction in Versailles; grid patterns of lampposts replace obelisks and rows of urns and statues as points of identity and continuity in the vast landscape.

A conventional map of Las Vegas shows two scales of movement within the grid plan: Main Street and the Strip. The main street in Las Vegas is Fremont Street, and the earlier of two concentrations of casinos is along three or four blocks of that street. Here, the casinos resemble bazaars, and the clicking and rattling slot machines are immediately adjacent to the street. The casinos and hotels on Fremont Street focus on the train station at the end of the street; here the movement scales of the railway and the main street meet. The bus station is now the busiest entrance to the city, but the axial focus of the train station as seen from Fremont Street is visual,

and possibly symbolic. This contrasts with the Strip, where a second and later phase of casino developments stretches south toward the airport, the jet-like gateway to the city.

Garu lighting is abundant along several parts of the Strip, which is illuminated in passing but nevertheless in an abundance of signs; but the consistency of their shape and position, and their curved form, allows us to identify during the day a continuous freeway space, and the constant rhythm contrasts effectively with the uneven rhythm of the underlying signs.

This counterpoint reinforces the contrast between the two types of order on the Strip: the easily perceptible visual order of street elements, and the difficult visual order of buildings and signs.

A typical casino complex includes a building close enough to the freeway to be seen from the road over the parked cars, yet far enough away to accommodate lanes, turnstiles and parking. The parking at the front is a symbol: it gives the customer a sense of security without obscuring the building. It is a prestige car park: the customer pays. The main part of the car park runs along the sides of the complex and provides direct access to the hotel, while being visible from

the motorway. The parking is never at the back. The size of the movement and the speed of the highway determine the distance between the buildings: they must be far apart to be perceived at high speed. Taking head-on shots of the Strip doesn't yet make as much sense as it does on Main Street, and parking is still the thing. Large space between buildings is characteristic of the Strip, while it is significant that Fremont Street is getting better on cards. A single postcard can feature the Golden Horseshoe, Mint Hotel, Golden Nugget and Lucky Casino. A picture of the Strip is less spectacular; its vast spaces must be seen as moving sequences.

The same sign functions as a polychrome sculpture in sunlight and as a black silhouette in backlight; at night it is a source of light. Its scale works both up close and far. It rotates by day and moves through the play of light at night. Las Vegas has the world's longest sign,
Thunderbird, and the tallest, Dunes. Some signs can hardly be distinguished from some high-rise hotels along the Strip from a distance. The sign at the Pioneer Club on Fremont Street speaks volumes. Its six-foot-tall cowboy says "Howdy Pardner" every thirty seconds. The large sign at Aladdin has spawned in the form of a small sign with similar proportions that marks the entrance to the car park. » But what signs! «<, says Tom Wolfe. The

hovering high above, with forms before which the existing vocabulary of art history is helpless. I can only try to name - Boomerang Modern, Palette Curvlinear, Flash Gordon, Ming-Alert Spiral, McDonald's Hamburger Parabola, Mint Casino Elliptical, Miami Beach Kidney.”

The inner oasis

If the back of the casino is different from the front in terms of the visual impression it is supposed to give to car traffic, then the inside contrasts with the outside for other reasons. The interior sequence, from the entrance to the rear, goes from gaming areas to restaurant, entertainment, shopping and hotels. Those who park on the side and enter there can interrupt the sequence, but the circulation in the whole focuses on the arcades. In a Las Vegas hotel, the check-in desk is always behind you when you enter the lobby: in front of you are the gaming tables and slot machines. The lobby is the arcade. The inner room and patio, in their upturned separation from the surroundings, is like an oasis.

Light sources, crystal chandeliers and the brilliant, jukebox-like slot machines themselves, are independent of walls and ceilings. The lighting is anti-architectural. Illuminated canopies, more than in all of Rome, float above the tables in the limitless dark restaurant of the Sahara Hotel.

The artificially lit air-conditioned interiors complement the agoraphobic car-scale desert with its light and heat. But the interiors of the motel's patio are literally an oasis in an alien
environment. Whether in organic modernism or neoclassical baroque, they contain the basic elements of the classical oasis: yard, water, greenery, intimate scale and an enclosed space. Here, there is a swimming pool, palm trees, grass and other horticultural imports set in a stone-paved courtyard surrounded by hotel suites with courtyard-facing balconies and terraces for privacy. What gives the beach umbrella and deckchairs meaning is that you have the enemy cars, waiting in the asphalt desert out there, fresh in your mind. The oasis of pedestrians in the desert of Las Vegas is the princely enclosure of the Alhambra, the apotheosis of all those motels with swimming pools more symbolic than useful, of the simple, low restaurants with exotic interiors and the shopping centers of the American strip.

Henri Bergson claimed that disorder is the order we cannot see. The order that emerges on the commercial line is a complex order. It is not the simple, rigid order of the Urban Renewal project, nor the fashionable megastructure - the medieval city on the hill with technological accessories. On the contrary, it manifests an opposite tendency in architectural theory: Broadacre City - possibly a travesty of Broadacre City, but still a kind of defense of Frank Lloyd Wright's predictions of a commercial streak in urban growth - Broadacre City but with a difference. Broadacre City and its simple, motivic order identified and united its vast areas and separate buildings at the level of the almighty car. Undoubtedly, each building would be designed by the Master or his Taliesian Society, with no room for loose improvisations. A simple control could be exercised over similar elements within the framework of the universal, »usonian vocabulary, which certainly excludes commercial vulgarities. But the order of the commercial lane includes: it includes at every level, from the mix of seemingly incongruous advertising media to a system of neo-organic or neo-Wrightian restaurant motifs in walnut Formica. This is not an order dominated by the expert, and made easy on the eye. The moving eye in the moving body must work to distinguish and interpret changing and juxtaposed orders, like the shifting configurations in a painting by Victor Vasarely. It is a unit that »retains, but no more, control over the conflicting elements of which it is composed. Chaos is near; to be on the verge of chaos and yet avoid it, is what gives ... power«.

Las Vegas is analyzed here only as a phenomenon in architectural communication; its values are not questioned. Commercial advertising, gambling interests and competitive instincts are something else. The analysis of the drive-in church would in this context correspond to the analysis of the drive-in restaurant, since this is a study in method and not in content. However, there is no reason why the methods of commercial persuasion and the skyline of signs should not serve to advance society and culture. But this is not something that the architect can completely decide on.

Also a way of saying it-barely satisfying: a flower study in worn-out poetic style that leaves one in the same excruciating wrestling with words and meaning. Poetry is not the main thing.