Boston Book Festival 2017

Note:  This takes on different meaning after the mass shooting in Las Vegas. We dedicate this session to those who lost their lives and to the hope of an end to the madness of gun violence. 

What happens in Vegas does not, as it turns out, stay in Vegas. The capital of kitsch and glitz has influenced American culture and values in many ways, perhaps most spectacularly in the election of a real estate developer as president, but also notably in relation to architecture and urbanism. In The Strip, Stefan Al, associate professor of urban design at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that Las Vegas’s many metamorphoses—from faux Western saloons and giant neon signs to Disney-like theme parks and today’s fancy casinos built by famous architects—mirror transformations in American society at large. The seminal book on architecture in Vegas, Learning from Las Vegas, published in 1972, was a treatise on symbolism in architecture and is available again in a revised version from MIT Press. That work is the subject of Aron Vinegar’s I Am a Monument. Vinegar, assistant professor in the Department of History of Art at Ohio State, takes a deep look into that iconic and controversial text to investigate its meaning today. Robert Wiesenberger, critic at the Yale School of Art, is the coauthor of Muriel Cooper, about the pioneering graphic designer of the MIT Press colophon and the first woman to receive tenure at the MIT Media Lab. Cooper’s design of Learning from Las Vegas was nearly as controversial as the text itself. This fascinating discussion about the meaning of  Las Vegas in the American landscape will be moderated by Lauren Jacobi, Class of 1942 Career Development Assistant Professor of Architectural History in the History, Theory + Criticism section of the Department of Architecture, MIT.