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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream

The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream

Al, Stefan

Paperback

General ArchitectureRegional: West

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0262544911
ISBN13: 9780262544917
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: Mar 22 2022
Pages: 272
Weight: 1.67
Height: 0.63 Width: 7.95 Depth: 9.92
Language: English
The transformations of the Strip--from the fake Wild West to neon signs twenty stories high to starchitecture--and how they mirror America itself.

The Las Vegas Strip has impersonated the Wild West, with saloon doors and wagon wheels; it has decked itself out in midcentury modern sleekness. It has illuminated itself with twenty-story-high neon signs, then junked them. After that came Disney-like theme parks featuring castles and pirates, followed by replicas of Venetian canals, New York skyscrapers, and the Eiffel Tower. (It might be noted that forty-two million people visited Las Vegas in 2015--ten million more than visited the real Paris.) More recently, the Strip decided to get classy, with casinos designed by famous architects and zillion-dollar collections of art. Las Vegas became the implosion capital of the world as developers, driven by competition, got rid of the old to make way for the new--offering a non-metaphorical definition of creative destruction. In The Strip, Stefan Al examines the many transformations of the Las Vegas Strip, arguing that they mirror transformations in America itself. The Strip is not, as popularly supposed, a display of architectural freaks but representative of architectural trends and a record of social, cultural, and economic change.

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