Rome Las Vegas: Bread and Circuses places two cities at opposite ends of architectural reputation into direct photographic dialogue, challenging the binaries of authenticity and artifice that have shaped how we read the built environment for half a century.
About This Book
Released fifty years after Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi's canonical Learning From Las Vegas (1972), this book returns to the questions that text provoked — not through theory, but through the lens. Iwan Baan's photographs move from aerial to street level across both Rome and Las Vegas, surfacing unexpected formal and atmospheric affinities between a city revered as eternal and one dismissed as spectacle. The project is not an exercise in equivalence but in looking: following Scott Brown and Venturi's own directive to first observe and understand before passing judgement. For anyone working at the intersection of urbanism, architectural photography, and the cultural history of cities, this book reframes a long-settled argument.
Key Features
- 320 pages of aerial and street-level architectural photography across two cities
- Photography by Iwan Baan
- Published by Lars Muller Publishers, ISBN 9783037787533
What You'll Discover
- How the visual grammar of power and spectacle recurs across ancient Roman and contemporary Las Vegas streetscapes
- The way aerial photography destabilises ground-level assumptions about which city is "real" and which is performance
- A half-century retrospective on Scott Brown and Venturi's Learning From Las Vegas enacted through image rather than text
- How photographic juxtaposition can dissolve entrenched critical binaries around authenticity and artificiality in architecture
About the Author
Iwan Baan is an architectural photographer whose practice spans documentary urbanism and the close study of individual buildings. His work is known for its attention to human inhabitation within designed environments, and he has collaborated with many of the world's leading architects.
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 320
- Dimensions: 17 × 22.7 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783037787533
- Publisher: Lars Muller Publishers
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects, urban theorists, and photography collectors drawn to the cultural history of cities and the ongoing legacy of postmodern architectural thought.