Yearning about Las Vegas

Venturi Scott Brown (I think of them now as simply a hip brand name, when they gave up architecture for (s)peculation) are at US again. Forty years ago they dragged 13 unlucky Yalies to witness and connive about the ugliest (visually and sociologically) community in America, perhaps in World History. Never was sociological blather so mendacious about serious issues.

Now I grant I’m prejudiced: my father abandoned my mother and me when I was three to start a new life as a real estate tycoon in Las Vegas in 1930 with his office secretary. I didn't see him again for forty years until, doing cruising PR for the then new Annenberg School, I surprised him in his LV office where he had since become a millionaire. He too was full of glib BS about the greatest playground in the world.

Several tutorials later I remained convinced that he had simply and very profitably participated in the infantilization of a great country, aided and abetted by gangsters. Get the VSB’s 60’s hipness of uttering the paradox that architecture needn’t be solemn—it could be FUN (though he was still in his forties then, and should have been thinking more clearly.) Maybe Denise was a bad influence. But, hell, can’t a couple have some fun on their honeymoon?

Still and all I agree with Peter Blake (It’s an Anglified name of a Jew who fled Hitler) who became the best architectural journalist of his generation. He believes that Philip C. Johnson’s cynicism about worker housing finally neutralized the Bauhaus idealism that Gropius had tried to teach him. (He mocked him secretly, this parvenu that believed only ARTitecture mattered.)

The quasi-Nazi phase he went through in the late 20’s and early 30’s prepared him to easily acquiesce in every “Mannerist” wave that followed the defeat of Bauhaus idealism from the 1970’s on. Now the Dippy Duo is back at Yale insisting how prescient they were about LV’s cultural legitimacy. Have they been there lately? Are they proud of the newer and weirder Vegases going up in Dubai and Macau? Playpens for the meretriciously rich or their wannaboobies! Meanwhile half Africa is rushing towards extinction, architecturally and otherwise.

America’s infrastructure nears collapse. And the Duplicitously Dippy Duo still peddles its glib lies to another generation of Yalies who couldn’t care less about the architecturally abandoned. The leading design critic of our generation, IHT’s Alice Rawsthorn, estimates that ninety percent of our design professionals cater to only 10 percent of the world’s population.

The Dippy Duo have nothing to offer these abandoned. Oh yes, those smug Ivies at Yale can sign up for a special course this semester on VSB “wisdom”. Meanwhile, down at MOMA, they’re touting the Bauhaus on its 90th anniversary, those curators who curate only for the wealthy few, while our cities disintegrate.

The same slick fools who have wrecked our banking system temporarily play the same game. Now that Communism is defeated in Eastern Europe, we can all feel useful in sucking up to the equally rich. What the VSB “philosophy” sorely lacks is common sense: Cameron Sinclair’s “Architecture for Humanity” with its Bible, “Design As If You Gave a Damn,” says it all. Why are all the A Schools ignoring Christopher Alexander, and Malcolm Wells, while a complacent establishment toots a childish horn for the Dippy Duo? Because that’s where money is!

For Shame. When Pruitt-Igoe was blown up “because Modernism had failed”, the architects lied. It was racism not Architectural Modernism that had failed. The Dippy Duo ignore the crucial agenda as they simulate paradoxical complexity because the architectural faculties are airheads who feel comfortable “thinking” with Dippy Duo.

Pritzker, Pritzker. Anyone wanna buy a hotel chain?