Urbanizing the Mojave Desert: Las Vegas
{Die Urbanisierung der Mojave-iiste: Las Vegas)
Nicole Huber and Ralph Stem
Jovis, 2008
I For many would-be and actual critics of and experts on popular culture,
Las Vegas is too easy a mark. They can analyze the evolution of its
entertainment from vaudevillian to Rat Pack to lounge lizard to Cirque du Soleil.
They can honor supposed mobsters as businessmen or deride supposed
businessmen as mobsters, then analyze how corporate control has been different
and whether corporate owners are not just the same men but without the
pinstriped suits and fedoras. They can claim that it is an actual community with
the same or worse social problems as anywhere else, or they can project their
own desires or misfortunes onto Las Vegas to blame it for their failings and
those of society in general. The possibilities are endless.
In fact, serious historians, cultural critics, sociologists, and other academics
or thinkers have written intelligently about Las Vegas, past, present, and future.
But none of them has made a bigger splash within their field than experts in
architecture or design, starting with Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and
Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism o f
Architectural Form, published in 1972, followed by Alan Hess, Viva Las Vegas:
After Hours Architecture in 1993. But in such fields as history and sociology,
the Strip has no monopoly; the broader structure of the community has received
its share of attention. So it is at last with architecture, with Nicole Huber’s and
Ralph Stem’s Urbanizing the Mojave Desert.
To summarize what the book actually says in a review is difficult. If you are
the kind of reader who highlights a sentence or phrase that makes you stop and
think, or that you want to return to for further reflection, every page will be
almost entirely yellow. The book is full of thought-provoking commentary, and
the excellence and meaning of the photographs are similarly important and
useful in developing a better understanding of Las Vegas—if, indeed, it had
been understood in the first place. In analyzing Las Vegas, they write, “one can
speak of three dichotomies: the Strip and the surrounding city, the landscapes of
success and failure, and the erasure of the past in search of an ever-new fiiture.
A fourth dichotomy is also essential to understanding our photo-documentation:
the profound tension between the processes of urbanization in an extreme and
extremely fragile environment and the landscape in which these processes have
unfolded” (13).
The chapter titles suggest the dichotomies, the competing forces at work.
“Sites of Transition” is a lengthy essay putting Las Vegas in an architectural and
urban, but also American and western, perspective. The photographs are
arranged into chapters entitled “Rears & Edges,” “Signs & Traces,” “Mobility &