Unravelling the Postmodern City: Architecture, visual experience and counterculture in Las Vegas

Beyond Venturi’s architectural theory in Learning from Las Vegas (1968), the evolving Postmodern architecture is characterized by the use of certain symbols that give meaning to precise artistic elements. However, these architectures can also provide the public with a banal, everyday-life element of artistic category. Thus, surface and odd elements found in the contemporary city of the Postmodernity are understood, not only as artistic elements, but also taken as representative elements of society itself.

According to Guy Debord in La Société du spectacle (1967), the spectacle – or show – concentrates the whole attention of this new society. However, this does not exclusively
refer to images, but to the relationship that is established between individuals and images as well. These interactions create further representations that showcase a reality. The purpose of this “show” is to transform these images into more visible and noticeable elements. In this regard, this paper aims to study Postmodern architecture, and the city of Las Vegas as case study, from the perspective of a pure show that mirrors the visual experience of a post-Industrial and contemporary, society.

In this manner, Postmodern cities are transformed into in a dream-like urban environment that does not seek functionality, but covets the entertainment of the visitor, abstracting the the observer, from reality itself, submerging the individual in a new aesthetic and countercultural conception. These are sources of interpretation that have been constantly overlooked in recent scholarship on Postmodern architecture and that shall, however, be fully taken into account in order to enhance the approaches to the study of this dynamic research field.

This presentation intends, therefore, to bring together visual culture, literary accounts, and solid architectural theories, into a field of study that aspires to become a fundamental component to understand the theory and practice of Postmodern and contemporary urban planning and global visual culture as a whole.