In Sequence: Cinematic Perception in Learning from Las Vegas

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In Sequence:CinematicPerceptionin Learning from Las VegasLearning from Las Vegas is known mostly for the theory of the “decoratedshed vs. the duck” in contemporaryarchitecture. Martino Stierli places this influential urban study within thepost–World War II discourse on theimage of the city. For Venturi and ScottBrown, traditional visual techniqueswere no longer sufficient for the analysisand representation of the city.

hunch12_pag017-152_zw_pms.qxp:hunch12_pag017-152_zw_pms 12-03-2009 15:51 Pagina 76

Learning from Las Vegas, a study on the contemporary American citypublished in 1972 by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and StevenIzenour, has long been considered one of the most influential books on architecture and urbanism written in the second half of the twentiethcentury. In arguing for a renewal of architectural practice out of the everyday landscape and the commercial vernacular, the book reliesextensively on the power of images. But there have only been partialattempts to locate the book within the discourse on the image of the cityprevalent in the 1950s and 1960s and manifest in such publications as Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960) or Gordon Cullen’s Townscape(1961). Moreover, by turning their attention primarily to the theory of the decorated shed presented in the second part of the book, many criticsoverlooked the fact that Learning from Las Vegas was first and foremost astudy on the perception and the representation of the contemporary city 1A new automobile-oriented urban form had evolved in the post–WorldWar II years that increasingly dominated the cities of the American West.For Venturi and Scott Brown, traditional visual techniques were no longeradequate for analysis and representation. For this reason, they experi -mented primarily with media such as photography and film in order to arrive at an appropriate representation for this newly evolving urbanform. Venturi and Scott Brown started with the premise that the image of the contemporary American city consisted primarily of asequence of vistas from a mobile, even automobile observer. Accordingly,film and cinematography were of particular importance to their study.

Venturi and Scott Brown on the Image of the City and Film Even before Learning from Las Vegas was published, Venturi and ScottBrown and, in particular, Denise Scott Brown had shown an interest in using film for the analysis and representation of urban form. In a 1968 review of the Urban Atlas, published by the MIT Press in 1966,she commented, “Films should be used to show trends in growth, past to future, to avoid the one-shot character of the present atlas.” 2 Similarly,she argued in her “Learning from Pop” of 1971: “New analytic techniquesmust use film and videotape to convey the dynamism of sign architectureand the sequential experience of vast landscapes.” 3 Both statementsmake clear that in Scott Brown’s view, film was capable of representingthe dynamic development of cities much better than such relatively staticmedia like cartography or even photography. The city equaled a spatio-temporal experience, and for this reason it was best understood by meansof visual narration, or, in other words, as a sequence of images amountingto a cinematic experience.

Scott Brown also hinted at the potential of commercial movies to producea strong urban image. In her essay “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, andPlanning” of 1969, she wrote, “Planners and urban designers should be leading the way but it is the moviemakers—for example, Antonioni in La Notte and Red Desert and more effectively in Blow-Up—who haveinvestigated the architectural implications of the local scene.” 4 This appliesparticularly to Las Vegas, whose image in the 1960s was already shaped to a large extent by the mass media and by Hollywood. At a very early stage,the movie industry portrayed Las Vegas as the playground of the mafia, to which the city allegedly owed much of its existence and financialsuccess. At the same time, a heist comedy such as Ocean’s Eleven from 1960,starring Frank Sinatra and his “Rat Pack,” promoted Las Vegas as theentertainment capital of the West, where more celebrities and movie stars

1Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour,Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972), 8.Prompted by Denise Scott Brown, Venturi and Scott Brownmade their personal discovery of Las Vegas in 1966. Out of this first joint visit resulted an article published in the Architectural Forum in 1968, whose content wasreprinted in slightly different form in the later bookpublication. Steven Izenour became a part of the Las Vegasproject in the fall of 1968, when Venturi and Scott Browntaught their Las Vegas studio at Yale University. He playeda major role both in the studio and the book publication.On the basis of this genealogy, I will use “Venturi and ScottBrown” in the following to refer to the whole teaminvolved in the project.

2Denise Scott Brown, “Mapping the City,” Landscape 17, No. 3 (1968): 24.

3Denise Scott Brown, “Learning from Pop,” in Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, The View from the Campidoglio. Selected Essays 1953—1984 ( New York:Harper & Row, 1984), 28—31.

4Denise Scott Brown, “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning,“ Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35 (1969); 186.

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A double-page spread from Learning from Las Vegasdepicting a movie sequence traveling north on the Las Vegas Strip

Front cover of first-edition Learning from Las Vegas,1972. The glassine dust jacket is printed with the book’s chapter titles listed in consecutive order.


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could be spotted than anywhere else. As far as Learning from Las Vegas isconcerned, George Sidney’s 1964 film Viva Las Vegas, starring Elvis Presley,is particularly interesting. With this film, Las Vegas entered into Americanpop culture for good. The movie opens with a flight and drive overFremont Street and the Strip at night, staging the visual exuberance of the neon-lit signs. Sidney’s visualization not only provided the classicimage of 1960s Las Vegas; it also anticipated Venturi and Scott Brown’sobsession with this remarkable urban aesthetic.

According to Venturi and Scott Brown, Las Vegas represented anessentially new type of the city that required new means of graphic and visual representation:

[This] study will help to define a new type of urban form emerging in America and Europe, radically differentfrom that we have known; one that we have been ill-equipped to deal with and that, from ignorance, we definetoday as urban sprawl. An aim of this studio will be,through open-minded and nonjudgmental investigation,to come to understand this new form and to begin to evolve techniques for its handling.5

For Venturi and Scott Brown, the city constituted not only a functional,formal, sociological problem, but also a perceptual experience, that is, a visual representation of a spatial reality. In the case of the contemporaryAmerican city, the observer tended to see the city from a moving car atheightened speed. The visualization of the city was therefore not a matterof simultaneous perception, but of a sequence of moving images similarto a movie. Accordingly, film took a prominent part in Venturi’s and ScottBrown’s exploration of the contemporary city. This was especially true for the research studio they conducted with a group of students from YaleUniversity in the fall semester of 1968. The preliminary program of the studio specifically asked the students to use cinematic techniques for the analysis of the city. This focus on filmic methods of representation is clearly evident within the book, such as can be seen in a two-pagespread of black-and-white film stills that report a car drive on the Strip.The temporal succession that cannot be depicted in the static medium of a book is here translated into a spatial order.

Less known is the fact that the “Learning from Las Vegas” project alsoresulted in a number of films that were produced by the students of the Yale studio. This studio involved a research trip to Los Angeles and Las Vegas; of the nine days spent in Las Vegas, two were reserved for film shooting.6 Before the trip, Venturi and Scott Brown assigned theirstudents twelve problems, two of which explicitly called for a cinematicapproach. One of the assignments read: “Our representation techniqueslearned from architecture and planning impede our understanding of Las Vegas, since they are static where it is dynamic, contained where it is open, two-dimensional where it is three-dimensioned. You are asked too to take over the graphics coordination task for the class whichinvolves expediting the production of a film script for 16 mm filming by the class.” 7

The first film that resulted from these assignments is entitled Las VegasDeadpan and has a running time of twenty-one minutes. It is an

5Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, ix.

6Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour,“Studio LLV: Tentative Schedule for First Half,” in Studio LLV:Learning from Las Vegas ( New Haven: Yale University, 1968).

7Ibid.

8As Denise Scott Brown has pointed out: “It was a subjectivitygarbed as objectivity—a wolf in sheep’s clothing. We werequite aware of it.” From Denise Scott Brown, personalcommunication with author, September 2008.

9Denise Scott Brown, “Remedial Housing for ArchitectsStudio,” in Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates, On Housesand Housing, Architectural Monographs 21, ( London: AcademyEditions, 1992), 56.

10Ed Ruscha, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, ( Los Angeles, 1963);Ed Ruscha, Some Los Angeles Apartments, ( Los Angeles, 1965);Ed Ruscha, Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles, ( Los Angeles, 1967).

11For Every Building on The Sunset Strip (1966) Ruscha mounteda Nikon in the back of a pickup to photograph both sides of the famous road in Los Angeles. The takes werelater collaged to a large leporello. See Neal Benezra and Kerry Brougher, eds., Ed Ruscha. ( New York: Scalo, 2002),205. The same technique was used by Venturi and ScottBrown for their “Ed Ruscha Elevation of the Strip” in Learning from Las Vegas.

A selection of film stills from the openingsequence of Viva Las Vegas directed by GeorgeSidney, 1964 [ p. 175 ]


uncommented record of a drive along the strip interrupted by a numberof cuts and cross-fades. The scenery changes several times from day tonight, where the effect of the illuminated neon signs is the most strikingelement. Moreover, a short sequence from a helicopter ride is inter -spersed, after which the car drive resumes. While the night sequencesseduce with their gorgeous colors, the day shots seem inanimate, if not boring. Indeed, the film title, Las Vegas Deadpan, indicates that thiswas an impression deliberately sought by the filmmakers. The adjective“deadpan” has a series of meanings, the most relevant in this context being“marked by complete absence of expression or mobility” and “giving no sign of emotional or personal commitment or involvement.”“Deadpanning” thus designates a way of looking at things that tries to keep out the personal preferences and allusions of the observer as muchas possible. It is, so to say, a way of recording the outside world in a mannerpretending to non-subjective.8 In an article written in 1970, Denise ScottBrown clarified the meaning of “deadpanning” in the architecturalthinking of Venturi and Scott Brown: “What new techniques are requiredto document new forms? We should aim to dead-pan the material so that it speaks for itself. Ruscha has pioneered this treatment in his mono -graphs. It is a way to avoid being upstaged by our own subject matter.” 9“Deadpanning” thus means a way of looking at things without pre -conceived value judgments. This technique is, as Scott Brown points out,borrowed from pop artist Ed Ruscha and his typological photographicresearch documented in such monographs as Twentysix Gasoline Stations(1963), Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965), or Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967).10 All of them are concerned with everyday elements of the contemporary American city and represent them in a documentary,even banal way. This applies as well to Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip. His leporello, an accordian-fold book with reproductions of black-and-white photographs of buildings, served for Venturi and Scott Brown as the prototype for their own photomontage of the Las Vegas Strip, which represents the elevations of both sides of the road.Venturi and Scott Brown also adopted Ruscha’s method of arriving at a “deadpan” image of the city by filming with the aid of a camera mountedon the hood of a car and equipped with an engine.11 This techniqueguaranteed a documentary or “deadpan” glance at the city by eliminatingartistic considerations such as selection, composition, and proportion, as well as the selective perception of the human eye. It was, in other words,the replacement of artistic judgment with the objectivity of the machine.This was an obsession not only prevalent with Pop and Conceptual Art of the time (as can be seen in Ruscha’s example), but also a scientific atavismof the late nineteenth century, where the mechanical image of the camera was used to achieve “objectivity,” or, maybe more to the point, a rhetoric of objectivity, since it was rather an image of objectivity that was sought and achieved than objectivity itself.12

The second film under consideration is entitled Las Vegas Electric and has a length of only four minutes. Again, it basically documents a drivethrough Las Vegas, but this time the depiction is limited to the spectacularnightscape and focuses primarily on Fremont Street in the downtownarea. Unlike the “deadpan” movie discussed before, this film is charac -terized by an eminently artistic and at times even experimental approach.There is a quasi-surreal sequence where the neon signs along the road are mirrored horizontally. In another passage in the middle of the film,the bright neon lights on the soffit above a sidewalk on Fremont Street

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A selection of film stills from the openingsequence of Viva Las Vegas directed by GeorgeSidney, 1964 [ p. 175 ]

Detail from Edward Ruscha, Every Building on theSunset Strip, 1966

A Ruscha-inspired elevation of the Las Vegas Strip,from Learning from Las Vegas, 1972

12See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “MechanicalObjectivity,” in Objectivity, (New York, 2007), 115–190;Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40 (Fall 1992): 81–128. See also in this connection Michael Golec, “ ‘Doing itDeadpan’: Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour’s Learningfrom Las Vegas,” Visible Language 37, no. 3 (2003): 266–287.


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A selection of film stills from Las Vegas Deadpan, October 1968

A selection of film stills from Las Vegas Electric, 1968 [ p. 175 ]


are transformed into an almost psychedelic abstraction of colors, forms,and lights. In contrast to the automobile view of the first film, this moviealso includes a pedestrian perspective. Several of the takes clearly recallthe introductory sequence in Viva Las Vegas.

Finally, a third movie documents a helicopter ride over the Strip during daytime. The focus of the camera is predominantly on the large “high-reader” signs along the road, which attract the attention of the driver from a large distance.13 The main theme of the film is the displacement of architectural form by the symbolic dimension of architecture. At the same time, it is the only film from the Yale studio that does not focus on the view from the road.

On City Images and SequencesHistorically speaking, the avant-garde had early discovered the potentialof film for the representation of the city. Already in 1896, a cameraman of the Lumière brothers mounted his camera on a gondola while movingthrough the canals of Venice in order to film the palazzi on the banks.One of the earliest manifestations of a preoccupation with the use of film in architecture and urbanism is a short essay by H. W. Jost thatwas published in the German journal Der Städtebau (“Town Planning”) in 1916. According to Jost, film was superior to “lifeless photography” for the representation of the urban experience. In the German Werkbundas well, film received a lot of attention. Bruno Taut and Peter Behrens in particular enhanced cinematography for the representation of architecture.

However, there were other and perhaps more important points of referencein the appreciation of film for Venturi and Scott Brown than the GermanWerkbund. Among them was the English “townscape” movement which was propagated in the British Architectural Review between the late1940s and the mid-1960s. The townscape movement had its roots in Gestalttheory and was preoccupied primarily “with the visual aspects ofarchitecture, as distinguished from the technical, professional sociologicalaspects.” 14 At the same time Gordon Cullen, the spokesman of thetownscape movement and later author of a book of the same title, heldthat the city did not present itself as a static image but as a dynamicexperience of a viewer in motion. Thus, in the introduction to his bookCullen stated that “although the pedestrian walks through the town at a uniform speed, the scenery of towns is often revealed in a series of jerksor revelations.” Consequently, he argued for “serial vision” as a basicprecondition for the perception of the city 15 and called for “design[ing]our towns from the point of view of the moving person.” 16 He therebyanticipated a central aspect of Learning from Las Vegas, although withouttaking into consideration the automobile observer. The sequentiality of city perception is illustrated in various instances within Cullen’spublication, most notably in his elaborate drawings of town studies, suchas the one executed for Evesham.17 Photographic sequences can be foundas well, as is the case in the chapter on “closure” with an example fromBlandford Forum.18 Despite Venturi and Scott Brown’s reservations thattownscape ideology was purely “picturesque,” in an essay, Scott Brownsingled out the Architectural Review’s article series on townscape as importantinput for their architectural and urbanistic thinking.19 Moreover,Venturi’s very first publication, which concerned itself with a critique on urban renewal around the Campidoglio in Rome from a historical

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Since the publication of Learning from Las Vegas, the city has passed several ordinances that limit the prolifer -ation of billboards. In May of 2004, following a three-year battle between outdoor advertising agencies andcommunity activists, Clark County enacted a sweepingban on the construction of new billboards. Countyofficials cited “visual blight,” sexually suggestiveadvertising, and driver distraction as reasons for limitingthe number of new signs. The ban has been increasinglycontested by an association of local billboard advocateswho have argued that the rule will allow for the mono -polization of the industry by larger companies like ClearChannel Outdoor. We might ask if this is what Venturihad in mind when he proposed a “Committee to PreserveOur Billboards” in 1967.

13The term “high-reader” is an expression used by Venturiand Scott Brown for large-scale signage that is locatedalong the edge of the road and designed to be perceivedfrom a long distance while approaching at high speed.

14“The Functional Tradition,” The Architectural Review 107, no. 637 (1950): 3.

15Gordon Cullen, Townscape, ( London: Architectural Press, 1961), 11.

16Ibid., 12.

17Ibid., 199–204.

18Ibid., 106–110.

19“Our Team 10 Primer and the Aldo van Eyck issues of Dutch Forum are worn but dusty, and so are ReynerBanham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Ageand the townscape series in The Architectural Review.”Denise Scott Brown, “A Worm’s Eye View of RecentArchitectural History,” Architectural Record 172, no. 2 (1984): 80.

A page from a chapter discussing ideas of serialvision from Gordon Cullen, Townscape, 1961


perspective, was published by The Architectural Review as a contribution to the townscape series. Its contents and argument were clearly informedby the townscape approach to the city.20

Townscape was an attempt to update the English tradition of the“picturesque.” Both townscape and the picturesque took into account the aspect of movement for the perception of the city and the landscape.The German art historian Adrian von Buttlar, referring to the philosopherEdmund Husserl, has used the term “kinaesthetics” or “kinaestheticexperience” when talking about the perception of the picturesque Englishgarden. According to this, the picturesque garden is conceived in a cinematic way as a sequence of vistas that result from the movement of the observer. That this was indeed programmatic of the picturesquegarden becomes clear in a statement by one of its most importanttheoreticians from the end of the eighteenth century. In his commentaryto William Mason’s The English Garden: A Poem, William Burgh identified“variety” and “path” as two chief characteristics of the picturesquelandscape garden. The term “path” clearly signals the importance of move -ment in the picturesque. In modern theories of the city, the “path,” in the sense of a sequence of vistas, became an important topic. The ideaof the picturesque thus resurged not only in Camillo Sitte’s Städte-Bau,but also in Le Corbusier’s formula of the “promenade architecture,” whichalso presupposes a moving spectator in the perception of architecture.

City Form, Perception, and the Research at MITAs far as the cinematic image of the city is concerned, another importantpoint of reference for Venturi and Scott Brown was a research projectconducted at MIT in the late 1950s, entitled “The Perceptual Form of the City” codirected by Gyorgy Kepes and Kevin Lynch.21 Lynch’s 1960publication The Image of the City is the most widely known result from this research. The relationship between automobile movement and the form of the city was a central focus in the whole research project.Kepes, who taught in the 1940s at the Chicago Institute of Design (the so-called “New Bauhaus”), together with his longtime friend andcolleague Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, had early shown interest in the relation -ship between architectural and urban form on the one hand and mobileperception on the other. In a syllabus for their cotaught course on militarycamouflage techniques Kepes and Moholy-Nagy stated: “[T]he aerialobserver for whom camouflage has to be largely considered today is a mobile observer. Every factor involved in his vision is in continuousmovement. His eye is moving, the light conditions are changing and the elements of the landscape are moving.”22

With the MIT research project on the “perceptual form of the city” the question of mobile perception came into the foreground again. In his essay “Notes on Expression and Communication in the Cityscape”from 1961, Kepes referred to the cinematic term of the “sequence”: “Each path of travel offers its characteristic challenge. The basic unit of our urban vision, accordingly, is not the fixed spatial location but thetransportation-defined pattern of a sequence of vistas.” 23 Moreover,Kepes stressed the potential offered by the relatively new technique of cinematography for the analysis of the form of the city: “There is a potential new keyboard of creative formation that can be understoodwith the aid of technical tools, such as motion pictures, and it may be used with increasing scope.” 24 While Kepes’s article isn’t mentioned

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In order to obtain accreditation for the Chicago Instituteof Design, Moholy-Nagy offered to assist in the war effort by developing strategies for the U.S. military. The school offered courses in camouflage, trainedinstructors in the art of visual communication, andorganized rehabilitation classes for wounded soldiers.Moholy-Nagy’s Institute was not a typical technicalschool—the artist would often berate programs thatproduced “narrow minded specialists” who were“incapable of comprehending the wider, human aspectsof their work.” The wartime production of the Institutecoupled work on abstract light and composition thatbegan at the Bauhaus with specific military assignmentssuch as the camouflaging of oil storage tanks onChicago’s South Shore.1

20On the relationship of both Venturi and Jane Jacobs to the townscape movements see Peter L. Laurence,“Contradictions and Complexities. Jane Jacobs’s and Robert Venturi’s Complexity Theories,”Journal of Architectural Education 59, no. 3 (2006): 50–53.

21“Notes on Contributors,” Daedalus. Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 90, No. 1 (1961): 215.

22“Outline of the Camouflage Course at the School of Design in Chicago 1941–1942,” Box 4, Kepes Papers, AAA.In Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex. Architecture,Media, and Corporate Space, (Cambridge: The MIT Press,2003), 59.

23Gyorgy Kepes, “Notes on Expression and Communicationin the Cityscape,” Daedalus. Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 90, no. 1 (1961): 150.

24Ibid., 150.


anywhere in the written work of Venturi and Scott Brown, the coursebibliography of the Yale studio on Las Vegas listed several of his books. A few years earlier, Venturi in Complexity and Contradiction had quotedexplicitly from Kepes’s book The New Landscape.

The other key figure in the MIT program on the perception of the city was Kevin Lynch. Already in his study The Image of the City he had arguedthat the contemporary city implied a spatio-temporal experience that represented itself as a sequence of vistas in a temporal succession:

Considering our present way of experiencing a large urbanarea...one is drawn toward another kind of organization:that of sequence, or temporal pattern. This is a familiar ideain music, drama, literature,or dance. Therefore it is relativelyeasy to conceive of, and study, the form of a sequence of events along a line, such as the succession of elementsthat might greet a traveller on an urban highway.25

Lynch and Kepes stressed the importance of sequential perception in their “summary of accomplishments” on the MIT project. In it, theyasked for an analysis of the effects of inner-city freeways on the perceptionof the driver and his passengers. To this end, they documented a number of trips on various highways in New England with the aid of photography,film, and written protocols. The car thus became a machine for a newvision of city, a “vision in motion.”

With respect to Learning from Las Vegas and the problem of the sequentialperception of the cityscape under discussion here, another of Lynch’spublications must be considered even more important, namely the bookThe View from the Road, published in 1964, in collaboration with DonaldAppleyard and John Myer.26 What Kepes had postulated earlier was here developed into a full-blown theory of perception in motion in the contemporary city. As suggested by the title of the study, its topicwas the view from the road, thereby implying that the contemporary city is normally perceived from an automobile perspective. It was focusedon highway construction and was primarily directed towards engineers,and its goal was to develop a design strategy for urban highways thatwould allow the driver to perceive the city as a well-ordered, aestheticallypleasing, and meaningful whole. As with Venturi and Scott Brown, the perception of the city was conceived as a sequential experience of amoving spectator, analogous to film: “The experience of a city is basicallya moving view, and this is the view we must understand if we wish to reform the look of our cites.” 27

The importance of the MIT study for Venturi and Scott Brown is furtherstressed by the fact that Venturi and Scott Brown relied on notationaltechniques developed by Appleyard et al. for the depiction of the sequen -tiality of the dynamic perception of the city. In The View from the Road, the authors used vertical arrows next to a series of photographic imagesof the city in order to indicate directions for “reading” the images in a quasi-filmic sequence. While this technique is not used in Learning fromLas Vegas itself, it appears in the largely unknown “Alameda Report” from 1977, which in many ways must be considered a translation of theLas Vegas study into a different setting, namely that of the town of Alamedain the San Francisco bay area.28 Regarding their notation techniques

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The panoramaIn the nineteenth century, the panorama was perhaps themost exemplary and popular form of urban representation.Essentially a painting of some expansive view mountedover a cylindrical wall, it was a protocinematic form ofmass entertainment, so popular that every major Americanand European city boasted permanent buildings devotedto changing installations of panoramas by the midcentury.

Viewers arrived after proceeding through a dark corridorinto the center of a cylindrical room muraled over withconsuming, illusionistic views of seaside towns or con -gested metropolises. They spun around to see the breadthof the world before them. Launched from darkness into an instant sublime, they surveyed over the city almostlike omniscient gods of the lands.

In terms of representational modes, the cinema showsfragments in sequence while the panorama shows the whole as a field.

25Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, (Cambridge: The Technology Press / Harvard University Press, 1960), 113.

26Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John R. Myer, The View from the Road, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964).

27Ibid., 63.

28On the “Alameda Report” see Martino Stierli, “Die Stadt ins Bild gerückt. Der Alameda Report als Beispiel visueller Stadtanalyse bei Venturi und ScottBrown,” in Stadtformen. Die Architektur der Stadt zwischenImagination und Konstruktion, ed Vittorio MagnagoLampugnani and Matthias Noell (Zürich: gta, 2005),282–299.

A double-page spread with photographic imagesequences of the Northeastern Expressway in Boston from Donald Appleyard, John Myer, and Kevin Lynch, The View from the Road, 1964


for picture sequences, Appleyard et al. referred to experiments conductedby a certain Philip Thiel, whose importance has been acknowledged in turn by Scott Brown as well.29 Thiel experimented with sequentialperception in a Japanese garden and published his findings in an article in the Architectural Review.30

Modernity, Cinema, and the Loss of AttentionThe authors of The View from the Road describe the driving experience as “a sequence played to the eyes of a captive, somewhat fearful, but partially inattentive audience.” 31 It should be mentioned in thisconnection that the loss of attention observed here had been identified as a characteristic of modernity decades earlier by a number of culturalcritics such as Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Theodor Adorno.32 More importantly, the same thinkers also relatedthe inattentive mode of perception to the experience of the moviegoer in front of the screen. Kracauer, for example, characterized the greatcinemas of Berlin as “palaces of distraction.” 33 Moreover, according to Walter Benjamin, film and architecture shared an inherent affinity in that both media require a distracted perception (“Zerstreuung”),whereas the work of art in general asks for the exact opposite, namelyconcentration (“Sammlung”).34 As far as architecture is concerned,Benjamin’s “perception in distraction” is based on the aspect of “tactility,”which he equates with the “utility value” of architecture. Architecture is thus not simply and not just a visual phenomenon that requires attentionin the sense of a “tense alertness.” Rather, it is subject to a habitualperception based on “casual notice.” This form of perceiving “in passing”is, according to Benjamin, characteristic for both architecture and filmand therefore makes both media pronouncedly modern. Accordingly, the liquefaction of the image of the city into a sequence of vistas onlystresses an attribute that is inherent to architecture and its perceptionfrom the very beginning. What then can be concluded from this withregard to the understanding of urban form? If the argument of Venturiand Scott Brown is correct, then urban form must be understood as areflection of the rules of visual perception under the specific conditionsof modernity. Newly evolving urban forms at the beginning of thetwenty-first century, such as in Dubai or—perhaps more to the point—in the tropical megalopolises around the globe, raise the question of whatmight be the adequate means of the representation of today’s city. RemKoolhaas’s research has suggested that visual representation may no longerbe meaningful or possible in these instances because the vast expansion of these urban conglomerations exceeds the human capability to perceiveand to cognize. Thus it seems the spatial logic of the contemporary city still awaits the theorization attempted by Venturi and Scott Brownfor an earlier urban form, and both the image of the city at the beginningof the twenty-first century and the means to adequately represent it yet have to be found.

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29Personal communication to author, 21 June 2006.

30Appleyard, Lynch and Myer, The View From the Road, 4;Philip Thiel, “An Experiment in Space Notation,”Architectural Review 131 (1962): 326–329.

31Appleyard, Lynch and Myer, The View From the Road, 5.

32On the history of (the loss of ) attention and thephenomenon of distracted perception see Jonathan Crary,Suspensions of Perception. Attention, Spectacle, and ModernCulture, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).

33Siegfried Kracauer, “Kult der Zerstreuung,” in Das Ornamentder Masse, ( Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 311.

34Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seinertechnischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Dritte Fassung,” inGesammelte Schriften, vol. I.2 ( Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp,1991), 505.

Driving the Las Vegas Strip, 1968. Photographer: Denise Scott Brown[ pp. 171 /174 /167 ]


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Students from the Yale University “Learningfrom Las Vegas” research studio mounting a movie camera on the hood of a car, October 1968[ p. 168 ]

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown driving along the Las Vegas Strip in 1966 [ p. 170 ]


In Sequence: Cinematic Perception in Learning from Las Vegas

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