For most Las Vegans, it will be just another convention, spreading name-tagged and gift bag-toting tourists up and down the Strip, doing their part to nourish Nevada's General Fund. But the American Institute of Architects 2005 National Convention and Design Exposition, which opened Wednesday and continues through Saturday at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, could be a watershed for the city.
For architect Brandon Sprague, a Las Vegas native who opened his own firm, Aptus Architecture, in 2003, it means "Hey, we can actually do this. We're a big enough city now." Sprague was president of the local chapter of the AIA as it laid plans for the convention, and likens it to a city landing the Olympics.
It must mean something that a guild devoted to design would deign to convene in the capital of kitsch and pastiche. Granted, most of the 25,000 expected attendees do not toil in theory's hothouse for fawning, spendthrift clients. But a national convention is an opportunity for the uncelebrated multitude to reconnect with the lofty ideals of their calling, which have little to do with lap dances, slot tournaments and yard-long margaritas. But Las Vegas at its centennial offers plenty to ponder for designers of both buildings and cities, as it has for decades.
Thirty-three years ago, architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour posited Las Vegas as an antidote for the city-killing orthodoxy of mid-century modernism. In Learning from Las Vegas, which resulted from a study undertaken with a group of students, they associated an automotive tour of the Strip with a pedestrian ramble of Rome. Both engaged the viewer with "spatial richness," as Venturi put it in a 2001 talk here—the highly expressive, "religious and dynastic" streetscapes of Rome and the "hypercommercial" neon signs of the Strip. Each in its way offered an alternative to the sterile, self-involved sculptural monuments architects designed under the aegis of the so-called "International Style."
Las Vegas has changed dramatically, of course, since the days of Learning from Las Vegas. For one thing, the Strip is no longer purely an automotive zone, dominated by signs meant to lure motorists beyond parking lots to the "decorated sheds." Pedestrians throng its sidewalks, strolling among "ducks" (after a duck-shaped building on Long Island), buildings that are not merely decorated but designed to look like something else. When Venturi and Scott Brown visited in the mid-1990s with a crew from the BBC, they found the city in the throes of its "family" phase, a change which they described in an essay, "Las Vegas After Its Classic Age," as reflecting "an evolution from Vaughan Cannon [of Young Electric Sign Co.] to Walt Disney."
Steve Wynn had something to do with that evolution, building casino resorts that thrust themes at you through front-yard performances—the Mirage volcano, the Treasure Island pirate battle, the Bellagio fountains. All three still hold court on the boulevard, although the post-Wynn sexing up of TI speaks to a shift away from "family" to "adult." And Wynn's latest, eponymous contribution to the resort landscape indicates a more general rejection of a Disneyesque theme. The Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne noted as much, but demurred: "The theme is mid-rise office tower in Houston, circa 1983."
Hawthorne's comment typifies the general underwhelmed reaction to the overhyped Wynn Las Vegas. Actually, that upswept curve sheathed in coppery glass is an improvement on the earlier generation of unremarkable, cross-plan, glass-curtained towers that rise from decorated sheds all along the Strip. But it does herald a Las Vegas at a crossroads of sorts. With no theme but itself to sell, Las Vegas is poised to erect dozens of mid- and high-rise towers of no discernible aesthetic beyond watery late-modern or tepid postmodern. Scan the renderings of the condominium towers set to rise by the dozens along the Strip and you find no shortage of glassy swirls and masonry-paneled ranks of balconies, "anywhere" buildings whose style is International Wealth.
"I think the nature of a tower is pretty generic," Sprague observes, and indeed, it's hard to imagine what else to do with a residential high-rise whose appeal is dramatic views. Nonetheless, imagining such things is ideally what architects do. Sprague, like other architects here, is more concerned that the coming generation of towers acknowledge and accommodate the desert through materials and orientation—minimizing both heat-gain and annoying mirror-glass glare from sun exposure. Sprague notes that other Southwest cities, such as Phoenix, have developed a desert aesthetic that seems to work.
But of keener interest to Las Vegans, and to most local architects, is the city aggregating beyond the Strip, which might as well be Phoenix. Here the issue is not aesthetics but sustainability, in all senses of the word. Clark County's recently concluded Growth Task Force has called for affordable housing, mass transit and responsible development. The county's new development guidelines could help deliver on the third of these by promoting reasonably dense communities of mixed-use projects. Local architects might help ensure that these reflect a characteristic aesthetic, and not the Ye Olde Main Street look evident in early examples.
"We've got to work hard right now so when the boom's over, we're left with a good city," says Sprague, who hopes the AIA's visit will arouse local interest in quality architecture. But this city's residents are nearly, notoriously, as transient as its tourists. Unless they care to shape their city's future, Las Vegas will remain the theme chameleon.
Chuck Twardy is a really smart guy who has written for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.