Urbanizing the Mojave Desert: Las Vegas

Flashing facades, garish casinos, and neon lights—isn't that our image of the gambling metropolis of Las Vegas? But what of the city that lies beyond The Strip? Urbanizing the Mojave Desert: Las Vegas shows us the unknown, desolate side of Las Vegas and its environs. There, where the suburbs in the desert encroach on nature and change it, the book reveals the surprising connections between the architecture that defines the image of Las Vegas and the natural, abstract geometries of the Mojave Desert. In Learning from Las Vegas Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown focused on the glamor of the Las Vegas Strip, analyzing the city for its postmodernist qualities while ignoring the Mojave desert immediately beyond. Exploring the city at the same time as Venturi and Scott-Brown, the renowned architectural historian and critic Reyner Banham focused his attention on what he saw as the strikingly modernist spaces of the Mojave desert and disregarded the postmodernist lure of the Strip. Urbanizing the Mojave Desert: Las Vegas takes a different tack, presenting Las Vegas as a hybrid landscape shaped and reshaped by practices of everyday urbanization as they have taken place upon this arid land. This perspective reframes the seamless surfaces of draped neon lights, curtain walls, and landscape features layered onto the Mojaveʼs stark topography, uncovering distinct strata that re-spatialize the social, cultural, and environmental implications of urbanizing a fierce yet fragile desert.