The artificial ornament: Las Vegas
R. Venturi defines his aesthetics of ornamentation as follows: “The casinos and lobbies of Las Vegas are ornamental and monumental, open to the strolling public. With the exception of a few old banks and train stations, they are unique in the American urban landscape.” The temple transformed into a gaming hall: these are Venturi’s ornaments. “America relates to the Strip as Rome relates to the Piazza.”

Las Vegas remains, nonetheless, the most intensely artificially illuminated point on Earth, populated by true neon colossi. Entire buildings, hotels, casinos, shopping centers, become ornament through their architecture, in a continuous overlap between structure and decorative apparatus.

In the realm of artificial illumination, the architecture of Las Vegas is a daily manifestation of luminous power. The competition among the various owners of the gambling-cathedrals transforms the building façades into graphics of attraction and power over the public. At night, the frenetic play of light makes the building blocks swell upwards, downwards, left and right, creating a labyrinthine kingdom in pursuit of wealth.

Like a desert oasis, Las Vegas prospers through its architecture. Its main street explodes daily with the tension of gamblers, who, enveloped in the delirious game of light, lose all sense of night and day. My personal perception is of Las Vegas as a parenthesis within the urban narrative. This new city enjoys unique properties that, starting from a perceptual model of communication, heighten the visual experiment.

The gaming industry, which dedicates little space to residential buildings, associates its compositional method with the character of a desert carnival. The colors of the street-side scenes follow one another, multiplying into a moving perspective. The moving parts, the famous casinos, translate the gambling machinery concealed beneath the aesthetic of neon. The "contradictory" reproductions of Caesar’s Palace propose a twinning of two bordering worlds. It is a case where two limits, tending towards infinity, meet in the reincarnation of architectural form.



The Unity of Architecture and the Ornament of Las Vegas
The unity of architecture, as theorized by Viollet-le-Duc, is realized through the intimate relationship between structure and function, a principle that predates postmodern syntax and the American condition of reinterpreting the past within modern contexts.

As the architect himself affirms in Reasoned Architecture: “A Doric temple presents a kind of architectural unity, but if you turn a Doric temple into a stock exchange or a church, that unity is destroyed: for in adapting the building to a purpose other than the one for which it was erected, one must violate its arrangements and destroy what constitutes its unity.”

What matters for unity, Viollet-le-Duc emphasizes, is not the number of parts or ornaments, but the conformity of the built form to the type, nature, and intended use of the building: “…that it corresponds to the reasons, constraints, and needs that governed its internal arrangement; that the exterior of the building is visibly bound by the unity imposed by the necessities of the interior.”

Neoplasticism disrupts these correspondences through an autonomous and abstract use of parts. In this case, total ornamentation manifests through material-chromatic surfaces, whose structured morphology becomes a placement governed by numerical values of color and space . In Las Vegas, arrangements of color and form appear as sub-units composing a presumed urban spatial unity. Myriads of bulb-units illuminate the “facades” of buildings: fragmentation becomes the primary and unifying idea.

Artificial light is orchestrated like the splashes of a vast mechanical fountain. Many neon signs simulate the passage of time, evoked by the motion of a fountain. In Las Vegas, however, the mechanism that controls the jet is fully visible, even obvious. Unlike historical fountains, which conceal their hydraulic systems to preserve illusion, here the mechanics are flaunted.

The water displays around Caesar’s Palace shamelessly reveal this mechanization of movement. The artificial ornament of Las Vegas architecture, beyond exposing the theatrical deception of the building and the street it inhabits, becomes a superimposed facade, applied with the same logic by which, in Europe, a neon sign might be hung on a preexisting frontage.

The sacredness of the luminous sign, often broken in other contexts, is not at all defeated in Las Vegas by the presence of the past. The palaces that rise from the desert are built in the name of a modern and explicit use of technology. Transparent sheets, metaphorical or real, wrap the luxurious centaurs of light, whose faces, frequently renewed, shift with the flow of gamblers.

Attention plays with the visitor, in tune with the lure of the most seductive facade, the one best able to draw them inside. This kind of architectural ornament, now widespread in our own cities, finds its origin in Las Vegas: the brightest point on Earth in terms of electric energy.

To such a discovery, I would give a mention to this city itself. And to this oasis in the American desert, I grant the primacy of modernity in architectural ornament, even while acknowledging the utter arbitrariness that governs its compositions, its use of architectural languages, and its choice of materials.

From "Design of New Words"
The Unity of Architecture and the Ornament of Las Vegas by Filippo Lo Presti 1989