Review: I Am a Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas, by Aaron Vinegar and Relearning from Las Vegas, by Aaron Vinegar and Michael J. Golec

Abstract

Aaron Vinegar ; I Am a Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008, 234 pp., 82 b/w illus. $29.95, ISBN 9780262220828. Aaron Vinegar and Michael J. Golec , editors. Relearning from Las Vegas . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 208 pp., 27 b/w illus. $25, ISBN 9780816650613. Anyone with architectural training——or even above-average cultural fluency——is no doubt familiar with Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour's seminal text Learning from Las Vegas (1972) . The book is still regularly assigned in introductory architectural history surveys as well as in studios, and is one of a handful of texts generally agreed upon as required reading for students of twentieth-century architecture. More to the point, it is often held up as the quintessential postmodern architectural text, just as Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture is modernism's must-read. But, as with Le Corbusier's earlier text, its fame has often overshadowed its content. Like a celebrity, it has become known for its well-knownness to use Daniel Boorstein's 1962 formulation. For all those graduate teaching fellows dutifully dissecting the book's graphics and pithy aphorisms with their students, one wonders how many consider what the book is really about. Why was it written? What made it so influential? Is it still relevant? Indeed, after thirty-five years, its position as the reigning postmodern theory text certainly seems up for discussion, if not outright challenge. Two recent publications laudably tackle the book's legacy, meaning, and, most convincingly, analyze the artifact itself. Aaron Vinegar's I Am a Monument is a close reading of both the form and content of the book; Relearning from Las Vegas , edited by Vinegar and Michael J. Golec, is a collection of nine essays that aims to capture the rich sense of ambivalence in the original text (2). Together, the Vinegar and Golec books engender a renewed faith in both the historical significance and continued relevance of the original text and, in certain areas, they provide fresh interpretations that open up new ways of thinking about it. Vinegar's central argument in I Am a Monument relies unapologetically on the writings …