Review: The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream, by Stefan Al

Abstract

Stefan Al The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017, 272 pp., 63 color and 19 b/w illus. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780262035743 Is Las Vegas's architecture a train wreck or a treasure? Almost fifty years after Learning from Las Vegas , consensus eludes architects and academics. Either way, Las Vegas remains a continuing object of infatuation for many. Few can look away, as this new book's existence proves. In The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream , author Stefan Al offers a seventy-year overview of most of the major buildings, many of the architects, and some of the causes that have shaped the Las Vegas Strip, the stretch of desert highway that became an international capital of gambling, entertainment, charismatic architecture, and de facto planning. He relies on extensive research, exploring newspaper and magazine coverage, books, archives, and journal commentaries through the years, laying some of the groundwork to understand how Las Vegas came to be. He reminds us, for example, how financing—from Jimmy Hoffa's Teamsters union pension fund to Michael Milken's junk bonds—played a key role in making the Strip's increasingly large hotel-casino dream palaces real. Yet for all its detail, the book does not fully digest the voluminous information it amasses. Perhaps because its sources mirror conventional perspectives of their times, the book looks through a distorted lens. The titillation of gangsters, instant wealth, and sin has long dominated reports on Las Vegas in the popular press, and disbelief, distaste, and awkwardness have shaped most high-art critiques through the years. Judged by modernism's traditional measures of authenticity, “honest” structural expression, rejection of historic precedent, and the belief that less is more, Las Vegas, a surreal, mirage-like oasis in the sun-blasted desert, has consistently been found wanting. Over the years, however, the most useful commentaries on Las Vegas have come from those who—like Tom Wolfe, Reyner Banham, …