Learning From Las Vegas / Heaven or Las Vegas

Learning from Las Vegas is a 1972 book by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Translated into 18 languages, the book helped foster the postmodernism art movement. Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of "common" people and less immodest in their erections of "heroic," self-aggrandizing monuments. “Learning from the existing landscape,” Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour begin, “is a way of being revolutionary for an architect.” Perhaps more than anything else, the research methods pioneered in Learning from Las Vegas have changed the way architects practice and study, recasting quotidian landscapes as objects to be analyzed rather than ignored or denigrated. “Withholding judgement may be used as a tool to make later judgements more sensitive,” they write. “This is a way of learning from everything.” All cities communicate messages - functional, symbolic,