Advanced Design Studio, Schwarz

Teaching in Las Vegas

Las Vegas, America’s entertainment capitol, is once again changing its face. Gone are the boxes and parking lots of Learning from Las Vegas, razed and replaced by 5,000 room resort casino towers accompanied by custom-built theaters offering musical and theatrical stars. The casinos remain, but are now surrounded by celebrity chefs plying their trade around the clock among vast collections of high-end retailers imported from Madison Avenue and Rodeo Drive. Once a gambling destination, Las Vegas now produces the majority of its revenues in non-gaming ventures. All of this is good news for architects, who have been called upon to offer the next generation of spectacular experiences. To learn these new directions, we will need to conduct research.

We are self-consciously following in the footsteps of the 1968 fall semester, when Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour took eleven students to Las Vegas to look at the Strip. In opposition to the Modernist’s tabula rasa urbanism, they insisted that ‘there is a way of learning from everything.’ Their research influenced a generation of architects, and catch phrases like “main street is almost all right” came to represent not only an acceptance of American development patterns, but an interest in working with its materials: billboards, symbols, and streets. Their work focused on the strip typology, mining it for ideas and development patterns which were influencing the American landscape.

This studio is founded on the opposite idea. Forty years after LfLV celebrated the strip, American cities have choked on traffic jams, malls, and burdensome daily commutes. This studio turns attention away from the development patterns of LfLV and focuses on what has been learned in the rest of the world in the past forty years by suggesting that these urban conditions might now be applied to Las Vegas: mixed-use, high-density buildings, pedestrian friendly streets, continuous street frontage, public transportation, and pedestrianism.

Now, the question is no longer what can Las Vegas can teach the rest of the world, but rather, what can the rest of the world teach Las Vegas. We will exchange LfLV’s interest in closed systems by looking at more porous fabrics. Beginning the semester by looking outside of Las Vegas, we will visit several successful street developments on our way to Las Vegas before turning our attention to The Strip. We will begin in Miami, visiting great shopping streets in South Beach and West Palm Beach before flying to Dallas/Ft. Worth for a similar tour. Once we’ve arrived in Vegas, we’ll stay in a range of hotels and room types: suites, standards, Flamingo’s new ‘Go Rooms’ and a downtown hotel as well. We will meet with many experts: celebrities, entertainers, movie producers, and bankers to inform our research and critique our ideas. We will go to the biggest shows in town, Cher and Circ de Soleil and of course we’ll research ultra lounges like Pure. We will then analyze precedents as well as the site, studying both historical and contemporary influences ranging from cultural to architectural. Following this period of exploration and reflection, students will begin designing.

The studio’s program and site were selected to provoke the post-suburban condition of 21st C. Las Vegas. Sited at the intersection of Flamingo Blvd and The Strip, this area is among the most heavily trafficked—both vehicular and pedestrian— zones in Las Vegas. The program incorporates several adjacent parcels, each with a large casino and several thousand hotel rooms. Beginning on the south side of Flamingo Rd with the Bellagio, Paris and Bally’s, moving up the Strip to Caesar’s Palace, Flamingo, Caesar’s Forum Shops, Imperial Palace, and finally Harrah’s on the north side. Initially conceived as independent projects, students will be asked to think of the adjacent parcels as components in a single master plan.

At students’ discretion, additional program pieces may be added to knit together the existing low-rise casino/high-rise hotel towers, creating a new space which absorbs 60s and 70s Strip development. Historic parcels like Flamingo and Caesar’s Palace will be integrated into a future cohesive whole. Added program will range from large-scale public (arena, performance space) to commercial (Strip frontage). More importantly, back-of-strip parcels are included in the site, extending focus from The Strip to other major arterials. These parcels are a starting point for rethinking the development patterns which have characterized Las Vegas, and by extension, America, in the past. It offers a way of transforming individual, automobile oriented sites into a cohesive, pedestrian-oriented neighborhood.

The planning segment of the studio will lead to a master plan for the overall site. Students will develop an argument for additional program and an area of interest to explore at a larger scale. Then, we will focus on a building which reinforces the master plan idea, such as a casino/hotel, arena/ultra-lounge, or a performance theater.

Throughout the semester, guest critics will be brought in to help evaluate and guide decision making, peppering the students with points of view ranging from entertainment moguls, casino presidents, developers, architects and cultural historians in an effort to guide our thoughts and responses to Las Vegas’s rich cultural and architectural history.

The semester will conclude with collaborative work on a book which collects the studio’s earlier research and drawings. These graphic materials will be accompanied by guest writers. We hope to stage an exhibition showcasing our research, arguing for a reinterpretation of The Strip typology and demonstrating several approaches for urban development in the twenty-first century.