International Conference “Writing Buildings”

From Latourette to Neiman Marcus: On the Use and Disuse of Images in Architectural Criticism

Conference Presentation, July 2016

Near the end of their canonical book Learning from Las Vegas, after Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour have convincingly asserted the importance of architectural symbolism and communication, readers encounter a subsection titled “From La Tourette to Neiman Marcus.” Through six images and one short paragraph, the authors allege a sequence of formal borrowings from Le Corbusier to HOK, spinning a story of modern architecture’s rapid debasement and dilution. Importantly, it isn’t imitation they oppose, but rather the attitude adopted by late modernists, suggesting that, “replication would have been done better if it had been accepted philosophically and used wittily.” By unpacking each of the photographs in their sequence, in this presentation I reopened their intellectual and personal context in an attempt to recuperate the buildings they slandered. I also offered a hypothesis for why image sequences have fallen into disuse as a tool of architectural criticism, using evidence from Venturi and Scott Brown’s combative relationship with critics as symptomatic of a larger trend toward strict control of published imagery.

“From Latourette to Neiman Marcus” spread from the 1972 edition of Learning From Las Vegas featuring five Brutalist buildings.