WA/SA [waldrip architects/ s.a.] [architecture- los angeles]
Working 9-5, at...
Alberti, Sandro ‘L is for ‘Learning’, and ‘Las Vegas’; 28 April, 2006 [text45]
Venetian dream.
‘WA/SA’, ‘Aloha8’, and ‘Working 9 to 5, at...’
Today I was brought to that sinful Paradise that we call Las Vegas. I was delighted to experience the Venetian hotel, a new addition to the Strip since my last visit, although I also got to visit the landmark ‘Caesars Palace’ during a dinner party, poolside. Did you know that, in 1969, executives of Caesars Palace buried a time capsule, but the time capsule was stolen days
are fictions of fen-om: [www.fen-om.com]
Caesars now.
later? Las Vegas has thereafter attempted to live in the ever-present, but there is
no escaping history, as attested by ‘Ocean’s 11’ (shot back in 1966, and then again in 2001). Caesars Palace. Now there is an interesting starting point. Seemingly situated within the ‘mythology’ of the ‘new’ thematic megaresort era, it actually precedes it by some 35 years, deploying the first in the evolutionary series of the Strip’s thematic tricks. At first glance, it seems quite the same as the Paris, or the Venetian; a symbolic reproduction of a know past. But, alas, this one is a past we can never know, except as a historical reconstruction of a ruin:
The forum then.
“It is amusing to think how few of the great weavers of aesthetic theory had any familiar first-hand acquaintance with works of art and how many of them knew the art they talked about only through engravings…” [William M. Ivins; ‘Prints and Visual Communication’; 1978]
Very different. And maybe this is what makes Caesars reek of ‘outdated’. The ‘Classical’ forms attempt to evoke neutrality (note that attempts at pure ‘transparency’ emerge with Classical thought). However, these cannot be but partial re-productions, as much a child of 1960s worldview as of the Roman Forum of 800 AD. Very different, it is, to reproduce something that exists (and, maybe, safer). This is the case of resorts such as the Venetian (and Paris), spaces of simulacra that are different from their ‘originals’ because of their scale or position. Their form and materiality remains fully thematic, and, thus, timeless (unlike Caesars Palace, the recreation remains uncontaminated by any recent ‘contemporaneity’ that would soon become outdated; also, it is interesting to note that the other technique that might allow for timelessness, minimalism, is cleverly deployed by Rem Koolhaas in the development of the one ‘contemporary’ intervention here: the Venetian’s Guggenheim gallery). From these ‘iconic’ spaces,
Minimalist Venetian.
