Zurück in die Zukunft

Ein vom Getty Center in Los Angeles initiierter Ausstellungsparcours nimmt die südkalifornische Nachkriegsarchitektur ins Visier. Los Angeles hat den Ruf eines ausufernden Stadtmolochs. Die südkalifornische Metropole bietet aber auch hochkarätige moderne und zeitgenössische Architektur. Diese lässt sich derzeit in einer grossen Übersichtsschau im Getty-Museum und in weiteren Ausstellungen erkunden

Las Vegas in the rearview mirror: the city in theory, photography, and film

For their seminal work Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi,Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour documented sprawling postwar American city from a moving car. Martino Stierli examines their cinematic methodology against the back ground of contemporary photography and pop and conceptual art, including the work of artists Ed Ruscha and Stephen Shore, while highlighting Los Angeles as a cultural, urban, and architectural hot spot of the period. He considers how this approach relates to sociological theories and the phenomenology of urban spaces. He also sheds light on the polemics and controversies triggered by Learning from Las Vegas in architectural discourse and discusses them against models of high and low culture. Using both text and image, Stierli assesses the broad intellectual impact of this architectural manifesto and explains why the lessons from Learning from Las Vegas remain relevant for current debates in architecture and the arts