Architecture: Speaking officially and unofficially

William Arbizu 2006

View of Venturi and Rauchs Franklin Court

Project

Here the desire to communicate no longer exists; architecture is dissolved into a deconstructed system of ephemeral signals. In place of communication, there is a flux of
information; in place of architecture as language, there is an attempt to reduce it to a
mass medium, without any ideological residues; in place of an anxious effort to restructure
the urban system, there is a disenchanted acceptance of reality, bordering on extreme
cynicism. (Tafuri 285-6.)
Architecture can be said to have been the first mass medium1, and has always maintained a functionhowever minimal or subliminal at timesas such. Before printing technology, and Victor Hugos pronouncement
Ceci tuera cela (Levine 152)it was the sole broadcast medium of communication. From the cave wall
to cathedrals it delivered its content, which like a true form of mass media by Marshall McLuhans standards, included all of the other arts (painting, sculpture and even music). The passage quoted above is one
of many criticisms of the architectural production of Venturi, Brown and Rauch that appears in Tafuris The
Sphere and the Labyrinth. Given Tafuris criticism of Venturi and Rauch above, does Tafuri wish to suppress
the condition of architecture as mass media and why? And in light of our present moment, when architecture
is becoming increasingly electronicits surfaces emptied of any permanent contentblank screens ready
to be filled, where might this leave us?

Learning from Las Vegasor The War is Over?

Venturi, Brown, Izenour and their Yale architecture studio arrive in Las Vegas with an agenda, one that is
resigned to acceptance of the defeat of the progressive nature of early modern architecture (the War is
declared over), and as a consequence, a call to celebrate the creation of straightforward buildings in line
with the needs of the client and the times. (Venturi et al., Learning xiii). The authors promote an architecture
responsive to economic pressures that discards the rhetoric of revolution in Learning from Las Vegas.
This straightforward approachthat could perhaps be called market driven in todays termsincludes
the pronouncement of a new pluralism, a new receptivity to the tastes and values of other people, and a
new modesty in our designs (Venturi et al., Learning xvii). And while today this cultural inclusiveness is
usually considered favorable, this is a new modesty that accepts a more impotent role for the architect,
a role in which creating socially coercive architecture no longer has a place. Architectural ideals of social
engineering are to be discarded.

Manfredo Tafuri agrees with the authors of Learning from Las Vegas that the war is over, and this
century has witnessed the defeat of the avant-garde (Tafuri 267), but criticizes Venturi et al.s populist
stance as a regression. Venturi and Browns bricolage (Tafuri 298) is a regressive populism that arguably

returns the architect to the role of the docile temple or cathedral builder, who performs their tasks without
any utopian ideological residues. This regression suggests an architectural practice that does what it is told,
a practice that works within and accepts an ideological structure without criticism.

Representing Instead of Acting

In the course of their writing, Venturi et al. identify Pop Art as a source of inspiration (or validation) for their
formal operations and eclecticism. They describe a willingness to synthesize the High and Low forms of
art in our culture in contrast to the orthodoxy of High Modern architecture that has rejected the combination of fine art and crude art. (Venturi et al., Learning 6) In Venturis eyes, High Modern architecture not only
rejected this synthesis but also rejects the ordinary, the every-day. Further, its adherence to tastefulness
and high-mindedness results in deadness. A visual and cultural vitality is interpreted by Venturi when he
observes the juxtaposition between an Avis Car Rental sign and a reproduction of the statue of Venus that
one can only say is a superficial one. Venturi suggest these chaotic, arbitrary juxtapositions come to stand
for an idea of inclusiveness.
Allusion and comment, on the past or present or on our great commonplaces or old clichs,
and an inclusion of the everyday in the environment, sacred and profanethese are what

Architecture: Speaking officially...

This lack of critical comment is evident early on in the study of Las Vegas. The book begins with a caveat,
(perhaps one could call it a refusal):
The morality of commercial advertising, gambling interests, and the competitive instinct
[read capitalism] is not at issue here. Because this is a study of method, not content
[emphasis added]. (Venturi et al., Learning 6)
Perhaps incrediblyif you consider the nature of Las Vegas and what occurs therethe word capitalism
does not appear in the entire book. It is a conscious decision not to study the processes that create a condition
like Las Vegas in the first place. Ideologically neutral words like commercial, market and persuasion
are used to describe the economic activity of Las Vegas. The logos of multi-national corporations (gasoline
stations) are innocently described as familiar, like friendly beacons in a foreign land (Venturi et al., Learning
52). Their study innocently glides over larger social concerns, and while they recognize some aspects of the
cultural milieu that creates a Las Vegas, they offer us no judgment (social, political or historical) on this
development. In Learning from Las Vegas, Venturi et al. note that the spaces of old monumentality were
for communal crowds and our spaces of new monumentality are for separate people (Venturi et al.,
Learning 55) However, the word alienation never appears anywhere in the text, indeed they argue that this
is what the people want. In Las Vegaswhere individualism and privatization rulethe only vestigial civic
and collective body, the beautification committee, is cynically targeted for ridicule.

Tafuri recognizes that Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown may be expanding architectures role
to include the design of everything we visually experience, but it remains a superficial operation, a flux of
information in place of communication (Tafuri 285). Tafuri notes that they introduce the theme of dominating
visible space in its entirety[but] they interpret that space solely as a network of superstructures. (Tafuri
285) Venturi et al. never get to the lower level of the substructure (base) of our culture.
Venturi has in fact created a school of the disenchanted without any values to transgress.
(Tafuri 294)
This returns architecture to the role of a mass medium, where Tafuri would prefer Rossis silencewhich
can be read as a criticismto Venturi and Rauchs use of architecture as media outlet in the service of the
ideology on power. When Tafuri says a flux of information in place of communication about Venturi, perhaps
he is saying that in place of architecture has having an informed opinion, it is reduced to a conduit of information, like temples with mosaic murals, that broadcast messages from centers of power without comment.
In contrast, Rossis autonomous architecture silently keeps aloof from every ideology, (Tafuri 276) and
although like Venturis architecture, it also refrains from every utopian proposal for a new lifestyle, (Tafuri
276) its silence may be interpreted as being as critically deafening as the noise of Las Vegas. Tafuri notes:
[For t]oday, he who wishes to make architecture speak is forced to resort to materials
devoid of all meaning; he is forced to reduce to degree zero every ideology, every dream
of social function, every utopian residue. (Tafuri 267)
However, perhaps Venturis critical act is his revelation that architecture can only pretend it is autonomous;
it is only a pretext or conceit. Tafuri observes that Venturis engagement of reality does indeed make any
pretext of [architectures] autonomy purely illusory. (Tafuri 286)

are lacking in present-day Modern architecture. (Venturi et al., Learning 53)

This random spatial collage is likened to an aesthetic richness that Venturi et al. find correlates with in the
Pop Art movement. A movement that is portrayed in Learning from Las Vegas as show[ing] the value of
the old clich used in a new context to achieve a new meaningthe soup can in the galleryto make the
common uncommon. (Venturi et al., Learning 72) However is this new meaning that the authors read as
the purpose of Pop Art simply one of the beauty of the everyday? While it is true that Pop Art re-introduced
representations (and meaning) into art, and narrow[ed] the gap between life and art (Tansey/Kleiner 1115)
not all of its strains operated simply to aestheticize the everyday, functioning to make the cheap, vulgar and
everyday beautiful. Rather, much of the new meanings in Pop Art contained criticisms (oblique or overt)
of the cultural detritus created by our mass media and advertising machine, re-combined and re-presented
to us as art. In addition, some Pop Art questioned the institutions and conventions of Art itself. I would
argue that Venturi et al. misinterpret Pop Art as a celebration of the vitality of consumer culture, when, as
some art historians would say:
Trivially familiar as the form and iconography [of Pop Art] are, they create a powerful
effect when written large and out of context. The new landscape and still life of Pop
offer us views of the garish artifice that surrounds us and reflects us all too clearly.
(Tansey/Kleiner 1116)
One cannot miss the critique in a work such as James Rosenquists F-111, a juxtaposition of imagery that
evokes Americas synergistic intersection between consumerism, pop culture and a military-industrial complex
speeding us forward to destinations unknown. The reading of Pop Art we find in Learning from Las Vegas is a
superficial one, giving importance to any random juxtaposition rather than purposeful, relational oppositions
that truly create new meanings and connections.

F-111, James Rosenquist, 1965.

ILLUSIONS and MANIPULATION, ARCHITECTS as IMPOTENT EDITORS?

And yet, despite the polemically superficial tone of the book, Venturi et. al. do have an awareness of the larger
issues at stake. The end of Part I contains the following quote, (buried in the Studio Notes section), that
is very suggestive of what we are dealing with in terms of our cultural milieu:
People are looking for illusions; they dont want the worlds realities. And, I asked, where
do I find this world of illusions? Where are their tastes formulated? Do they study it in
school? Do they go to museums? Do they travel to Europe? Only one placethe movies
[emphasis added]. To hell with everything else.2 (Venturi et al., Learning 80)
Movies, television and printed publications tell us stories that wethe pop in populistexpect the

Architecture: Speaking officially...

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Browns operations merely re-present juxtapositions rather than re-construct productive juxtapositions. Venturi et al. represent a populist concept but they are simply quoting,
not enacting or creating, new populist concepts or possibilities.

Tafuris problem with representing instead of acting, is that [Venturi] deals only with a
virtual function and not an effective function. The mission of avant-garde architects of the past was to
use architecture to create new social conditions, a theater would be designed to create a new community
rather than simply symbolize this new community. The architecture participates in the act of the creation of
new social forms. Tafuri illustrates this with the example of Andrew Melville Hall [which simply] represents
in theatrical form the space of community integrationthat the orthodoxy of the Modern Movement had
hoped to make act as a nucleus of social precipitation. (Tafuri 270)

Tafuri does support engaging the real, but despite the war being over the operation of this engagement must be one that is from form to reform that might lead to a possible overcoming of[architectures]
own equivocations. (Tafuri 287) Tafuri calls for a move from a practice that concerns itself with what
architecture wishes to be, or wishes to say, toward what building production represents in the economic
gamepenetrating to the heart of the role played by architecture within the capitalist system. (Tafuri
287)

environments we live in and experience to confirm and conform to. This Pop culture machine that comes
into its own during these years is the generator of our milieu, and it is constantly creating, destroying and
re-creating consumable goods, content and symbols.

In the same passage at the end of the book Venturi et. al. also offer an opinion on the nature of the message,
and clearly articulate the coercive power of symbolism applied to architecture:
The didactic symbolism of Chartres may represent to somemedieval theology and to
others the depths ofsuperstition and manipulation. Manipulation is not the monopoly
of crass commercialism. And manipulation works both waysformal languages and
associational systems are inevitable and good, becoming tyrannies only when we are
unconscious of them. (Venturi et al., Learning 162)
Here again, does the ideology in power confer onto the architect the responsibility of ensuring any symbolic
communication is not unconsciously manipulative? According to Venturi in his book Complexity and Contradiction a subversive architect could use the tools of Pop Art to ironically express in this indirect way a true
concern for societys inverted scale of values (Venturi, Complexity 44) but realistically how much impact
can irony as a mode of practice have? Especially in a mode where ones architecture is operating as a mass
medium?
Tafuri would conclude our reading of Learning from Las Vegas with the warning wherever contemporary
architecture ostensibly poses the problem of its own meaning, we can discern the glimmering of a regressive utopia, even if it simulates a struggle against the institutional functions of language. (Tafuri 268) He

Architecture: Speaking officially...

In the last section of Learning from Las Vegas, the authors offer a brief opinion on content that somewhat
contradicts their earlier conception of the architects role:
Understanding the content of Pops messagesdoes not mean that one need agree
with, approve of, or reproduce that content. If the commercial persuasions that flash
on the strip are materialistic manipulation and vapid subcommunication,it does not
follow that we architects who learn from their techniques must reproduce the content
or the superficiality of their messages. (But we are indebted to them for helping us to
recognize that Modern architecture too has a content and a vapid one at that.) (Venturi
et al., Learning 161-2)
After suggesting a certain impotence of the architect, how do Venturi et al. arrive at this conception of an
empowered architect that has the ability to act with editorial powers within an ideologically neutral
practice of architecture as mass media? Architecture does not generate the content of Pop culture, it is imposed on architecture and all other forms of communication media. Especially when Venturi observes more
recently, in an interview that appeared in The Harvard Guide to Shopping,that:
[p]erhaps its not for the architect to designate the specifics of the content of architecture:
that it derives from societal culture in general. The architect of the Pantheon did not
compose the graphic inscription on the pediment, the architect-builders of the Egyptian
pylons did not specify the content of the hieroglyphics, etc. And in the information age,
the informational and decorative content that is to dominate form and space and compose
architectural expression should not derive from the architect. (Obrist 616)
Maybe the elemental content of architecture that architects have editorial powers over is rightly stated by
Umberto Eco as denotation and connotation:
[B]esides denoting its function the architectural object could connote a certain ideology
of the function. (Eco/Leach 187)
Here Eco defines for us where the architect of our current situation has editorial powers. The architect can
bring an operative ideology to the project that can be in direct contrast to the ideological forces the architect is
engaged with. Venturi is aware of the denotative and connotative possibilities of architectural production. In
the section Ornament: Signs and Symbols, Denotation and Connotation, Heraldry and Physiognomy, Meaning
and Expression in Learning from Las Vegas the authors make a good case for architectures communicative elements, whether they are consciously trying to signify or not. But in their descriptions of their work
(such as The Guild House) they only speak of connotations that reinforce (or communicate) existing ideology
without challenging it. The only criticism the authors allow for connotation is an anti-modernist stance on
the generation of architectural form and meanings.

also observes that in [t]he pleasure of subtle mental gamesthere is clearly no social value, it simply
registersthe state of mind of someone who feels himself betrayed;reveal[ing] to the very depths the
[impotent] condition in which someone who still wants to make Architecture is confined. (Tafuri 302) The
builds temples and basilicas.

Complexity and Contradictionor is More is more, more emergent?

It is interesting to consider Robert Venturis interest in engaging the complexity of ex-urban chaos as perhaps
prefiguring architectures current interest in emergent complex systems. The way Venturi describes the
seemingly uncontrolled proliferation of honky-tonk road town in both Learning from Las Vegas and Complexity and Contradiction combined with his desire to create new methods of analysis and representation,
(formally speaking), comes very close to contemporary descriptions and theories of cities as robust, emergent
systems. Perhaps in this way, Venturi et al. express a valid suggestion in reversing the hierarchical tradition
of Modern architecture and urban planning, for a more bottom-up, heterogeneous approach that embraces
emergence. When the authors quote Jane Jacobs; [n]o single element in the city isthe king pin. The
mixture is the king pin, its mutual support is the order.3 (Venturi et al., Learning 81); they arrive at Modern
Architectures Achilles Heel of sorts. The idea of a homogenous Ville Radieuse or Broadacre City is one
from which false consistency real cities will never grow [from]. (Venturi, Complexity 54) Architects need
to wake from dreams of pure orderwhich are imposed in the easy Gestalt unities of the urban renewal
project.It is perhaps from the everyday landscapethat we can draw the complex and contradictory order
that is vital for our architecture as an urbanistic whole. (Venturi, Complexity 104)
However it must be stated that the bottom-up emergence Venturi, Brown and Izenour found in Las Vegas is
a false one. It is not a democratic the people have spoken, it is capitalisms ideology where people are
spoken to, creating a commodified space that encourages and attempts to enforce consumption.

Iconography and Electronics upon a Generic Architecturecan Architecture be more than just
another Channel to watch?

The reality of today is that signs are a part of architecture with or without the architects consent and
involvement. The spaces of our lives are increasingly lit by the loglo (Stephenson 7) of moving images and
logo icons, signage ranging from the official (ads, corporate and media messaging) to the unofficial and truly
emergent (graffiti, local flyers etc.). Isnt it now near impossible to remain silent, when as soon as said
architect leaves the project (if not before), the buildings owners make deals with advertising outlets that
slap billboards wherever they can be slapped, or graffiti artists use the building as their canvas. We have
reached the point where every surface that is viewed by many people has an advertising and communicative
value that can be calculated in very specific monetary terms. In addition, we have reached the point where
electronic technology synergistically amplifies this proliferation.

In Venturis collection of essays Iconography and Electronics upon a Generic Architecture he finds
a parallel between our architecture and that of ancient civilizations, (not to mention the culturally regressive role of the architect as previously noted). However there is a potentially redeeming difference in that
the information of our age is not culturally monolithic and is basically ephemeral. Venturi observes a
difference in our electronic age whenimages can change over time, information can be infinitely varied
rather than dogmatically universal.Our iconography will not be etched in stone. (Venturi, Iconography 4-5)
He goes further when interviewed by Obrist and Koolhaas declaring:
The essential element of architecture for our time is no longer spacethe essential element is iconography.[R]emember this is the information age (as well as the electronic
age) and therefore signage is relevant.! (Obrist 593)
Robert Venturi constantly references temples, basilicas and Byzantine mosaics as being parallels to our
pixelized moving imagery, but I would argue a more productive analogy would be with town bulletin boards
and graffiti. The proliferation of electronic technology can now serve to create a truly emergent visual

Architecture: Speaking officially...

Spatial Images are the dreams of society. Wherever the hieroglyphics of any spatial image
are deciphered, there the basis of social reality presents itself. (Kracauer/Leach XV)

ROBERT VENTURI REDEEMS HIMSELF?

Venturi proves insightful in his essays that appear in Iconography and Electronics upon a Generic Architecture.
He comments on our cultural and temporal condition of simultaneity when he states [m]y favorite city of
now: Tokyo.[W]here the multicultural juxtapositions of Rome are sequential, they are in Tokyo simultaneous! (Venturi, Iconography 55) He also observes and bemoans architectures commodification as image in
fetishistic design publications:
So how about architecture as shelter rather than architecture as photowhose natural
place is within space than between pages.(Venturi, Iconography 276)
Robert Venturi also acknowledges the presence of the source of our ideology, that rose to power during the
cold war. Twenty or so years after writing Learning from Las Vegas he waxes nostalgically for the timewhen
we were on top of the world and before the American economy, social sensibility, and just plain will had
succumbed to excesses of military-industrial complexity, decadent capitalism. (Venturi, Iconography 85)
And he also comes to address his practice and its shortcomings:
Our approach to practice in the 1990s acknowledges, in general, multicultural contexts that
are global, and dynamic evolutionssocial, political, and economicthat our architecture
must accommodate. As practicing architects we regret the lack of social dimension in
our national overall ethos and Federal policy, and therefore in our national architecture
and within our own practice. (Venturi, Iconography 154)

However, he mis-characterizes global culture as being heterogeneous, and while it is true that
there is no longer a dominant ideal culture that can promote a universal order and ultimate unity.
(Venturi, Iconography 70) We do have a global popular culture and technology machine that is progressively
homogenizing and flattening various cultures across the world. This monolithic culture seems heterogeneous
because it can only differentiate itself with symbols and signs. As Umberto Eco observes when discussing
World Fairs and Expositions:
The planetary society has already standardized industrial production to such a degree
that the fact of showing a tractor or a space capsule no longer differentiates one image
of civilization from another. The only solution left is symbolic.meaning that the building
and the objects in itcommunicate the value of a culture, the image of a civilization.
(Eco/Leach 202-4)
Looking for room to operate
if the codes operative in architecture allow only slight differences from a standardized
messagethen architecture is not the field of creative freedom some have imagined it
to be, but a system of rules for giving society what it expects in the way of architecture.
(Eco/Leach 194)
Perhaps it is true that the architects task is of giv[ing] the people what they want4, while, to paraphrase the
Frankfurt School (critics like Adorno and Marcuse), making them want what they didnt know they needed. In
addition to promoting new electronic manifestations of two-way communication, Umberto Eco suggests that
architectural design communicates the function to be fulfilled[and] a conformityto certain usagesas
opposed to certain others.[the functional object of design] promotes a certain wayand signifies that
way.(Eco/Leach 183) In this space architecture can agree with, criticize or undermine and mutate

Architecture: Speaking officially...

.Signage with graffitiofficial meanings

modified by unofficial commentaries, a
truer discourse?

environment of communication. In the same way that the internet levels the playing field, couldnt electronic
architecture be a locus for the communication of official and unofficial messages? New ways that our
built environment can carry official signs and graffiti together.

In Venturis words a commercial electronic aesthetic for now is no worse than an industrial machine aesthetic of then. (Venturi, Iconography 306) However I would also argue for an aggregation of the
official commercial with the unofficial flyers, stickers and graffiti messages of modern urban life. It moves
architecture from the old form of hierarchical mass media to the new model of non-hierarchical world-wide
web, that while not without its own issues, at least allows for two-way broadcasting of the official and
un-official. In this way, our social reality is constructed in a truly more emergent way where our spatial
images carry a more heterogeneous spectrum of our dreams. Would Tafuri have agreed to this operation of
architecture as mass medium?

our ideological ways and expectations.

Ecos observations on the role of the architect go further, saying:
One might at this point be left with the idea that having the role of supplying words to
signify things lying outside its province, architecture is powerless to proceed without
a prior determination of exactly what those things are (or are going to be).

Or one might have come to adifferent conclusion: that even though the
systems of functions and values it is to convey are external to it, architecture has the
power, through the operation of its system of stimulative sign-vehicles, to determine
what those functions and values are going to berestricting men to a particular way of
life dictating laws to events.

These both go too far, and they go along with two unfortunate ideas of the role
of the architect. According to the first, he has only to find the proper forms to answer what
he can take as programmatic givens; here he may accept on faith certain sociological
and ideological determinations made by others, which may not be well founded. According
to the second, the architectbecomes a demiurge, an artificer of history.

[T]he architect should be designing for variable primary [denotative]
functions and open secondary [connotative] functions.
(Eco/Leach 199-200)

Returning to Tafuri, I would say Eco is restating Tafuris call to not only deal with virtual functions (Ecos
denotative ones), but to actively engage what Tafuri called effective functions, (Ecos open secondary functions), where an architect can carve out a little room to effect change.
Works Cited
Umberto Eco. Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture, pp. 182-202., and How an Exposition Exposes Itself, pp. 202-4, as quoted
in Rethinking Architecture: a Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Leach, Neil. New York/London: Routledge, 1997.
Siegfried Kracauer. On Employment Agencies: The Construction of a Space, p.60., as quoted in Rethinking Architecture: a Reader in Cultural
Theory, ed. Leach, Neil. New York/London: Routledge, 1997.
Neil Levine. The Book and the Building: Hugos Theory of Architecture and Labroustes Bibliotheque Ste. Genevieve, in The Beaux-Arts
and the Nineteenth Century French Architecture, ed. Robin Middleton, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982.
Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rem Koolhaas. An Interview with Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi. In Harvard Design School Guide to
Shopping: Harvard Design School Project on the City. Ed. Judy Chung Chuihua, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas and Sze Tsung Leong. Taschen
America LLC, 2002.
Manfredo Tafuri. The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s. Cambridge/London: The MIT
Press,1987/1980.
R.G. Tansey and F.S Kleiner. Gardners Art Through The Ages, Tenth Edition. New York: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1996.
Robert Venturi. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966.
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge/London: The MIT Press, 1987/1980.
Robert Venturi. Iconography and Electronics upon a Generic Architecture. Cambridge/London: The MIT Press, 1996.

Notes
1. Umberto Ecos following passage in Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture draws effective parallels between architecture
in relations to qualities that make a mass media:
[A]rchitectural objects seem to have characteristics in common with the messages of mass communication. To mention a few:
-Architectural discourse generally aims at mass appeal: it starts with accepted premises, builds upon them well-known or readily acceptable arguments, and thereby elicits a certain type of consent.
-Architectural discourse is psychologically persuasive.
-Architectural discourse is experienced inattentivelyin the same way we experience the discourse of moviesor advertising.
-Architectural messages can never be interpreted in an aberrant way, and without the addresse being aware of thereby perverting them.
Most of us would have some sense of being engaged in a perversion of the object if we were to use the Venus de Milo for erotic purposesbut
we use the cover of an elevated roadway for getting out of the rain or hang laundry on a railing and see no perversion in this.
-Thus architecture fluctuates between being rather coercive, implying that you will live in such and such a way with it, and rather indifferent,
letting you use it as you see fit.
-Architecture belongs to the realm of everyday life, just like pop music and most ready-to-wear clothing, instead of being set apart like
serious music and high fashion.
-Architecture is a business. It is produced under economic conditions very similar to the ones governing much of mass culture, and in this too
it differs from other forms of culture.[T]he painter canpursue painting independently,.the writer can produce works for which there
is no market.[B]ut the architect cannot be engaged in the practice of architecture without inserting himself into a given economy and
technology and trying to embrace the logic he finds there, even when he would like to contest it(Eco/Leach 195-6)
2. Quote is Morris Lapidus, as referenced in Learning from Las Vegas. The original quote is from Progressive Architecture (September 1970),
p.122.
3. Quote is Jane Jacobs, as referenced in Learning from Las Vegas. The original quote is from Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great
American Cities, New York: Vintage Books, 1961. p.376.

Architecture: Speaking officially...

Neal Stephenson. Snow Crash. New York/Toronto/London/Sydney/Auckland: Bantam Books, 1993.