Iwan Baan: Bread and Circuses

Inverting Learning from Las Vegas to build a new dialogue between two of the world’s most opulent cities

When architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi published Learning from Las Vegas in 1972, they revolutionized architecture by claiming that the lessons the American desert town had to offer equaled those of the Eternal City. ＂Las Vegas is to the Strip what Rome is to the Piazza,＂ they declared. Organized to mark the 50th anniversary of this landmark publication, Rome - Las Vegas creates a dialogue between these two cities through specially commissioned images by renowned Dutch architectural photographer Iwan Baan (born 1975). This project inverts the directive to look ＂from Rome to Las Vegas＂ and instead frames Las Vegas as the model for Rome. Beyond the obvious Italianate designs of Caesars Palace, Baan’s photographs survey the entirety of the Strip to create an all-encompassing dialogue between these two cities--one young and compact, the other ancient and sprawling, yet both indelibly marked by wealth, opulence and power. These images question whether we can regard architecture without moral judgment--which Scott Brown and Venturi suggested for studying Las Vegas--in the ecological and social contexts of the 21st century.