Urbanizing the Mojave Desert: Las Vegas

by Nicole Huber (Text by), Ralph Stern (Text by)

Overview

Flashing facades, garish casinos, and neon lights—isn't that our image of the gambling metropolis of Las Vegas? But what of the city that lies beyond The Strip? Urbanizing the Mojave Desert: Las Vegas shows us the unknown, desolate side of Las Vegas and its environs. There, where the suburbs in the desert encroach on nature and change it, the book reveals the surprising connections between the architecture that defines the image of Las Vegas and the natural, abstract geometries of the Mojave Desert. In Learning from Las Vegas Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown focused on the glamor of the Las Vegas Strip, analyzing the city for its postmodernist qualities while ignoring the Mojave desert immediately beyond. Exploring the city at the same time as Venturi and Scott-Brown, the renowned architectural historian and critic Reyner Banham focused his attention on what he saw as the strikingly modernist spaces of the Mojave desert and disregarded the postmodernist lure of the Strip. Urbanizing the Mojave Desert: Las Vegas takes a different tack, presenting Las Vegas as a hybrid landscape shaped and reshaped by practices of everyday urbanization as they have taken place upon this arid land. This perspective reframes the seamless surfaces of draped neon lights, curtain walls, and landscape features layered onto the Mojaveʼs stark topography, uncovering distinct strata that re-spatialize the social, cultural, and environmental implications of urbanizing a fierce yet fragile desert.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783939633501
Publisher:	Jovis Verlags- und Projektburo
Publication date:	10/01/2008
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	8.58(w) x 5.96(h) x 0.86(d)

About the Author

Nicole Huber is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington and a licensed architect in Germany. Ralph Stern is Dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Manitoba.

What People are Saying About This

Peter Carl

" . . . transcend(s) the customary generalizations and statistics we deploy when attempting to comprehend rapid urban growth. It also transcends what Denise Scott-Brown termed the "semiotics" of lifestyle gratification in the most famous treatment of the city, thirty years ago. . . . Stern and Huber do not preach; rather they have found a way in which the images capture the primordial drama and the text leads the viewer into the depth of the issue. This exhibition has the potential to make vivid what has so far eluded scholarship, development literature, architects' pronouncements: what is the true significance of the topography of mass-capitalism, how do we understand it, what is our stance with respect to it. This exhibition is about more than Las Vegas, and deserves every support."--(Peter Carl, University Senior Lecturer, University of Cambridge)

Ronald W. Smith

"The images in this project profoundly demonstrate what Las Vegas is as a place to live-a place of rather extreme economic and social stratification, sprawl, environmental exploitation, rapid development that is absent infrastructure, and fragmentation, yet also a place of energy and change as it morphs into a new but still undetermined urban form. I would think that the public, architects, educators, urban planners, and even developers, among other audiences, would be fascinated by the images in the project. Certainly anyone concerned with community sustainability would be concerned about the images."--(Ronald W. Smith, Vice President for Research and Director of Sustainability Initiatives, University of Nevada, Las Vegas)

Nancy Levinson

"In its provocative presentation of the rapidly urbanizing outskirts of Las Vegas, Sites of Transition: Urbanizing the Mojave Desert can be viewed as a not-so-distant mirror to the low-density development that is happening on the ever-shifting, outward-moving edge of Phoenix. With their powerful images of planned communities and power grids arising in the Mojave Desert, Ralph Stern and Nicole Huber suggest that we know far more about how to manipulate the land than how to inhabit the desert in ways both artful and responsible."--(Nancy Levinson, Director, Phoenix Urban Research Laboratory, College of Design, Arizona State University)

Editorial Reviews

Huber and Stern understand that future analyses of Las Vegas need to move beyond comparisons with Los Angeles and other southwestern cities such as Phoenix. ... The authors rightly enlarge the discussion by citing the work of cultural critic Ackbar Abbas, who contends that globalization domesticates what was once exotic and in this way makes the strange seem strangely familiar.

Places, Forum of Design for the Public Realm - William L Fox

… how rapid — and rabid — development has obscured and erased cultural and physical history. A must-read for anyone who calls [Las Vegas] home or for those who wonder about off-Strip life.

The Las Vegas Sun - Kristen Peterson

For those who live in Las Vegas, or study it, or both, this book is not merely vital. It is vitally necessary.

Historian and co-Author of Las Vegas: A Centennial History - Michael Green