Photographs of the Las Vegas Strip have a tendency to look like documents of science fiction film sets, not pictures of “real” places-an effect of persistent simulacrum, distilled in images of neon signs and billboards, and rendered in shades of the apocryphal. Instead, drivers creep along in stop and start traffic-or perhaps they are passengers, in the backseat of an Uber-and as they roll slowly by, each sparkling new casino and aging neon façade becomes an intimate visual, framed and flattened by the car windows into a postcard or a slide in an old View-Master, through which the city is experienced as a series of relics of a bygone modern era. Thompson-nor can the architecture student marvel judiciously at the budding urban sprawl as she might have as part of Denise Scott Brown’s and Robert Venturi’s Yale research studio in the 1960s. Today a motorist entering Las Vegas can no longer burn rubber along the Strip as she might have in the loathsome days of Hunter S. In the long tradition of writings and films about Las Vegas, the city is known first from the road-famously, in works such as Terry Gilliam’s film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), joined by bachelor buddy movies that begin with a road trip from Los Angeles. How do you shape the future of a city for a new, globalizing century- when it was an anomaly in the last one?
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