I’m like 2/3rds of the way through “learning from las vegas” right now and it’s verrrrry interesting. it’s making me rethink my whole postmodern/modern diatribe shit in all sorts of ways. go ahead and call me a retardo neophyte for just picking this title up, fine sure yeah… i personally especially have no excuse for not having read this shit sooner, considering one of robert venturi’s kids was a boss of mine in the dotcom era, but yeah that’s all neither here nor there.

anyway. the first section is clearly:

a) just a little bit less than immediately accessable,
b) the tome from which koolhaas ganked at least half his good ideas about book design, and
c) a fun and exciting lesson on how to write your very own pretentiously opaque architectural theory diatribe.

to wit: (a) speaks for itself, cuz only maybe a third of the references are properly footnoted and/or contextualized. i understand that this book is “for the headz”, so to speak, but what is the deal with the inconsistency? there was this namedropathon:

“… It has as little to do with Haussmann as with Ville Radieuse, with Ebenezer Howard as with the Metabolists, with Lynch as with Camillo Sitte or Ian Nairn. Frank Lloyd Wright would have considered it a travesty of Broadacre City, and Maki would probably find it a travesty of ‘Group Form.’ Perhaps Patrick Geddes might have understood and J. B. Jackson is very much attuned to it.”

i will now reveal exactly how poorly informed i am by saying that when i first read this, i could only positively identify “Ville Radieuse”, “Ebenezer Howard”, and “Frank Lloyd Wright”. of course as soon as possible, I googled and promptly bookmarked the rest of that shit so as not to feel completely stupid… i can only imagine what it was like if you were, like, a 1st year m.arch student reading this book in the seventies. you’d feel DUMB. no need for that, is there? bleah. this complaint probably says more about me than the book but erm yeah. I mean, cuz like the only reason I recognized “Ebenezer Howard” was becuz of my recent jane jacobs bender, and in her book (published about 8 years before “vegas” i believe), when she drops Ebenezer Howard, she bothers to go out of her way for a paragraph to explain who he is. i liked that. context. word that.

uhm. yes. but in the case of (b), it’s all bloody obvious if you’ve so much as flipped through “vegas” and “mutations”. clearly our buddy rem has taken the suggested formula (as per (c)) to heart. alls you have to do, apparently, is:

1. pick a spot that’s architecturally going nuts. v+sb chose vegas in this case. mr. koolhaas has penned works on the pearl river delta and lagos, and these places were all blowing up very large at the times of writing. this, i would say, is probably the hardest part of the book-writing process.
2. go to the spot and take a fuckton of pictures. thank god for digital and cellfone cams, right?!?!? sic your assistants on the library and have them dredge up images from the past. pony up the loot for a helicopter, fly over the site, and take pictures from there (this bit, especially, will make you look extra cool; v+sb ostentatiously referenced this specific detail in the first edition preface, as did mr. koolhaas, as quoted in this PDF here). quantity beats quality in this phase.
3. doodle copious postmodern verbiage on napkins the whole time. if you’re venturi and scottbrown, you simply republish these napkin doodles in their entirety. if you’re koolhaas, you hand them off to some of bruce mau’s interns and have them make cool-looking vector graphic thingees out of them.
4. come back from the site, and sit around with your smartypants beer buddies discussing it all. have your secretaries take thorough notes of every last word of your rambling rants and postured postulations.
5. do it up like big daddy paul virillo, and invent lots of two-word prolix phrases that might catch on with other people. maybe even copyright them. wacky!
6. in leu of actual conclusions, simply stop the whole project when you get sick of it, and dump everything (notes, sketches, photographs, et cetera) into galleys and bung it in the post to MIT press, where they will eat the entire situation all up like it was york peppermint patties.

hahaha. but actually yeah i’m in the middle of part two of “vegas”, which i’m finding to be unquestionably awesome and well thought out, as well as fucking hilarious. that shit with the guild house versus the ridiculous modernist tower thing had me laughing out loud in my seat on the train back to troy this past sunday night. also it’s good to shout “duck!” at buildings that have had their programs subverted by overt symbolism, yessir.

word. ok yeah. it’s lunchtime. I’m sure I’ll spew more rants when I actually finish the actual fucking book. yes yes. erm. till then!

-fish

Aldo Rossi’s the “architecture of the city” that and “collage city” by Colin Rowe are like the high and mighty trilogy along with what you are reading by bob and denise scott brown. I got to meet her at that Princeton Bullshit, and she is pretty rad. She has been completely shafted by the system though cause bob venturi had a penis. otherwise, it came up in a converstation between her and peter eisenman that those books (his included) were written as ways for architects to work out there thoughts about there own buildings. I look at those books completly differently now.

what you need is a good dose of archigram

As for urbanism…now that I have driven around southern italy and seen cities build on the tops of mountains cause food grows in the valley…i will never think of cities as center out sprawl again…holy crap.

oh yeah, the metabolist were these rad pm fuckers from japan.

http://www.reiser-umemoto.com/books/tokyobay/asada/asada.htm

big on organic shapes reflecting nature which pairs along with archigram pretty well:

http://www.archigram.net/

more process oriented but knowing that that came around in the same breath of air as well as the OUILIPO group in france:

http://www.nous.org.uk/oulipo.html

and fluxus in the states:

http://www.fluxus.org/

and my favorite and yours…buckminster fuller

it makes you wonder what they were drinking…

Your breakdown of the “formula” is spot on — thanks for the best laugh of the day.

My dream job is to design books for MIT Press, by the way…

//john