Vinegar, Aron

Cl. Cambridge, 2008

Book ID: 78592

In this provocative rereading of an iconic text, Aron Vinegar argues that "Learning from Las Vegas" is not only of historical interest but of absolute relevance to current critical debates in architectural and visual culture. Vinegar argues that to read "Learning from Las Vegas" only as an exemplary postmodernist text is to underestimate its deeper critical and ethical meaning, and to miss the underlying dialectic between skepticism and the ordinary, expression and the deadpan, that runs through the text. Perhaps most revealing is his close analysis of the differences between the first 1972 edition, designed for the MIT Press by Muriel Cooper, and the "revised" edition of 1977, which was radically stripped down and largely redesigned by Denise Scott Brown. The dialogue between the two editions continues with this book, where for the first time the two versions of Learning from Las Vegas are read comparatively.

234 pp., 82 b&w illus.