The Venetian Kit
In October 1968, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown took thirteen Yale students to Las Vegas for ten days. The book that followed, written with Steven Izenour, opens with a line that changed how architects look at ordinary places: "Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect."
The Venetian is what happens when that idea is built at full scale. A Rialto Bridge. A campanile on the Strip. Canals running through the interior with gondolas on them. Venturi's earlier line from Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture fits it: "Less is a bore."
