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- Learning From Las Vegas, Robert Venturi Denise Scott Brown Steven Izenour
“FROM ROME TO LAS VEGAS
Las Vegas is the apotheosis of the desert town. Visiting Las Vegas in the mid-l 960s was like visiting Rome in the late 1940s. For young Americans in the 1940s, familiar only with the auto-scaled, gridiron city and the antiurban theories of the previous architectural generation, the traditional urban spaces, the pedestrian scale, and the mixtures, yet continuities, of styles of the Italian piazzas were a significant revelation. They rediscovered the piazza. Two decades later architects are perhaps ready for similar lessons about large open space, big scale, and high speed. Las Vegas is to the Strip what Rome is to the Piazza.
There are other parallels between Rome and Las Vegas: their expan- sive settings in the Campagna and in the Mojave Desert, for instance, that tend to focus and clarify their images. On the other hand, Las Vegas was built in a day, or rather, the Strip was developed in a virgin desert in a short time. It was not superimposed on an older pattern as were the pilgrim's Rome of the Counter-Reformation and the commercial strips of eastern cities, and it is therefore easier to study. Each city IS an archetype rather than a prototype, an exaggerated example from which to derive lessons for the typical. Each city vividly superimposes elements of a supranational scale on the local fabric: churches in the re- ligious capital, casinos and their signs in the entertainment capital. These cause violent juxtapositions of use and scale in both cities. Rome’s churches,
off streets and piazzas, are open to the public; the pilgrim, religious or architectural, can walk from church to church. The gambler or architect in Las Vegas can similarly take in a variety of casinos along the Strip. The casinos and lobbies of Las Vegas are orna- mental and monumental and open to the promenading public; a few old banks and railroad stations excepted, they are unique in American cities. Nolli's map of the mid-eighteenth century reveals the sensitive an? complex connections between public and private space in Rome 17). Private building is shown in gray crosshatching that is carved mto by the public spaces, exterior and interior.”
- Power & Knowledge, Michele Foucault p.155
“How much will the machine then cost to run? But there is also a specifically political cost. If you are too violent, you risk provoking revolts. Again, if you intervene in too discon- tinuous a manner, you risk allowing politically costly phenomena of resistance and disobedience to develop in the interstices. This was how monarchical power operated. For instance, the judiciary only arrested a derisory proportion of criminals; this was made into the argument that punishment must be spectacular so as to frighten the others. Hence there was a violent form of power which tried to attain a continuous mode of operation through the virtue of examples. The new theorists of the eighteenth century objected to this: such a form of power was too costly in proportion to its results. A great expenditure of violence is made which ultimately only had the force of an example. It even becomes necessary to multiply violence, but precisely by doing so one multiplies revolts.
PERROT: Which is what happened in the gallows riots.
FOUCAULT: In contrast to that you have the system of surveillance, which on the contrary involves very little expense. There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interioris- ing to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself. A superb formula: power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be a minimal cost. When Bentham realises what he has discovered, he calls it the Colombus's egg of political thought, a formula exactly the opposite of monarchical power. It is indeed the case that the gaze has had great importance among the techniques of power developed in the modern era, but, as I have said, it is far from being the only or even the principal system employed.
PERROT: It seems that Bentham is mainly concerned here with the problem of power over small groups of individuals. Why is this? Is it because he considers the part as already the whole- if one can succeed at the level of the small group, one can extend the procedure to take in the whole of society? Or is it rather that the ensemble of society, the question of power on the scale of the social whole were tasks that had not as yet been properly conceived? And in that case, why not?”
#caprisun
- The Order of Things, Michel Foucault
