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Las Vegas isn't ugly, it's beautiful, but in ways that are hard to conceptualize and thus hard to talk about.
Robert Venturi and his associates made a good first try in their book "Learning From Las Vegas", published in
the Sixties, in which they examined the urban landscape of Las Vegas seriously in the light of classical models and modern
exigencies.
What they failed to investigate fully was the theatrical and cinematic mode of Las Vegas architecture.
Just before movies superseded it as the primary form of popular drama, Victorian theater was entering an odd and interesting
phase in which it sought ever more realistic representations of three-dimensional reality -- first on the proscenium stage
itself, then in large arena settings, such as those employed by the spectacle designer Steele MaKaye, who once flooded the
New York Hippodrome and sent life-sized replicas of Columbus's ships sailing across it to an island representing North America.
At a stroke, movies diverted this cultural desire for actual spectacular recreations of reality, because movies could
provide an image of it at less cost and with greater scope. But the desire never really died, and found an outlet in the tours
Universal offered of its stages and standing sets almost from the day it opened its vast lot in the Teens of the last century.
Disney further commercialized the phenomenon in the 1950s with Disneyland, which offered the sensation of visiting the
sets of Disney films, actual or imaginary, and provided a greater opportunity for interaction with those environments. Disney
thus revived, unconsciously no doubt, but with the intuition of genius, the buried ambitions of late-Victorian theater.
A movie set and a theme park attraction both create themed or narrative spaces -- three-dimensional theatrical arenas
in which the sensations of "realism" and artificiality resonate against each other. The result is an evocation of
childhood play, in which imagination can invest and transforms physical realities into something other than what they nominally
are.
The great casino resorts of Las Vegas are interested in the evocation of this same sense of childlike play for slightly
different reasons -- mainly to engender the sort of dream state in which gambling looks like a winning proposition. It's no
accident that the gambling industry refers to itself as the gaming industry.
The novelist David Kranes is also a student of and consultant on casino design, and in one very apt metaphor he likens
a good casino space to a good story -- you want to feel, he argues, that you will get surprised at every turn but never lost.
The degree of comfortable fantasy, of acceptable surprise, of welcoming strangeness, he further argues, ultimately determines
the commercial prospects of any "gaming" establishment.
All of this further clarifies the subliminal connection between late-Victorian spectacle theater, movies, film sets, theme
parks and the modern-day casino resorts of Las Vegas. It's a cultural phenomenon long neglected and wide open to fruitful
study.
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