Stanislaus von Moos

Study of contemporarY Swiss architecture.

At the peak of the 1968/69 students? riots at American Universities, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, together with Steven Izenour, pursued their Design and Research Studio on the topic of Las Vegas at Yale School of Architecture. The results of this were condensed into the book Learning from Las Vegas that became a classic almost instantly upon its first publication in 1972. The treatise excited the 1970s architecture world and has remained influential to architects, teachers and theoreticians to the present day.0Some forty years later, 'Eyes that Saw: Architecture after Las Vegas' offers a richly illustrated collection of essays by renowned scholars of art and architectural history, eminent architects, and artists, investigating Learning from Las Vegas and its heritage from various perspectives.

The architectural partnership of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown has long been known for its preeminent position in the theory and practice of architecture. Their writings, including Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Los Vegas, have profoundly directed architectural thought in the twentieth century. The firm's built work - in its creative understanding of history and the everday environment, its emphasis on multiculturalism and multimedia, and especially its considerationof iconography versus abstraction - has been equally influential. This comprehensive monograph on Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates includes more than eighty buildings and projects: urban plans and development studies; important civic buildings such as the Sainsbury Wing of London's National Gallery; and a great number of projects at universities across the United States. Also presented are spectacular renovations for the Frank Furness library building at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard's Memorial Hall and designs for houses, exhibitions, fabrics, furniture, and decorative items. The catalog, written by the architects, focuses on important aspects of their practice in the late 1980s and the 1990s, notably the juxtaposition of a "hype" sensibility in decoration - manifested in large-scale LED signs and colorful supergraphics - and a generic architecture. The introductory essay, by Stanislaus von Moos, discusses five major themes in Venturi and Scott Brown's architecture: its dialogue with their hometown, Philadelphia, as both a national shrine and a center of architectural innovation; the importance of the American campus as a model for planning and design; organicism as a source of their design theory; the role of realism and abstraction in the firm's architecture; and the Venturis' recent interest in Japan and its traditions. Finally, in an interview conducted by von Moos and Mary McLeod, the architects comment on Las Vegas today, the role of feminism and mannerism in architecture, and the importance of the ordinary. -- from front flap.