Urbanizing the Mojave Desert: Las Vegas - Hardcover

Nicole Huber; Ralph Stern

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 393963350X ISBN 13: 9783939633501

Publisher: Jovis, 2008

Synopsis

In "Learning from Las Vegas" Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown focused on the glamour of the Las Vegas Strip, analysing the city for its postmodernist qualities while ignoring the Mojave desert immediately beyond. Exploring the city at the same time as Venturi and Scott-Brown, the renowned architectural historian and critic Reyner Banham focused his attention on what he saw as the strikingly modernist spaces of the Mojave desert and disregarded the postmodernist lure of the Strip. Urbanizing the Mojave Desert: Las Vegas presents neither a modernist nor a postmodernist view of the city and its environment. The text and images do not project ideals of urban development, nor do they solve social and environmental problems. Rather, they present a hybrid landscape shaped and reshaped by practices of everyday urbanisation for a city now characterised as the "first" city of the 21st century. They offer a "third site", exposing the complex but often interstitial spaces of everyday production and consumption tied to physical and virtual place making as well as con-temporary local and global investment. This perspective reframes the seamless surfaces of draped neon lights, curtain walls, and landscape features layered onto the Mojave s stark topography, uncovering distinct strata that respatialise the social, cultural, and environmental implications of urbanising a fierce yet fragile desert.

About this title

Product Description:

Flashing facades, high-end-casinos and neon lights - isn't that how one knows the gambling metropolis of Las Vegas? But what picture does the city have to offer beyond the pulsing pleasure boulevard The Strip? "Urbanizing the Mojave Desert: Las Vegas" shows us the unknown, desolate side of Las Vegas and its environs. There, where the suburbs in the desert encroach on nature and change it, the book reveals the surprising connections between the abstract architectonic sculptures which mark the image of Las Vegas, and the spacious abstractions of nature in the Mojave Desert.

Review:

Huber and Stern understand that future analyses of Las Vegas need to move beyond comparisons with Los Angeles and other southwestern cities such as Phoenix. ... The authors rightly enlarge the discussion by citing the work of cultural critic Ackbar Abbas, who contends that globalization domesticates what was once exotic and in this way makes the strange seem strangely familiar.--William L Fox "Places, Forum of Design for the Public Realm "

... how rapid -- and rabid -- development has obscured and erased cultural and physical history. A must-read for anyone who calls [Las Vegas] home or for those who wonder about off-Strip life.--Kristen Peterson "The Las Vegas Sun "

For those who live in Las Vegas, or study it, or both, this book is not merely vital. It is vitally necessary.--Michael Green "Historian and co-Author of Las Vegas: A Centennial History "

About this edition

• Publisher: Jovis
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 393963350X
• ISBN 13: 9783939633501
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192