LETTERS FROM LAS VEGAS

The most instructive city in the world for anyone who designs for people, and the one most often dismissed. Letters From Las Vegas takes it seriously: showmanship as a design discipline, hotel interiors at a scale nowhere else attempts, lighting used as theatre, and pattern deployed without a single apology. We revisit the city that Venturi and Scott Brown sent their students to study in 1968, an exercise that became Learning from Las Vegas and changed how architects talk about ordinary buildings. Plus the makers who supply the spectacle, the neon boneyard, and restaurants among the best anywhere.

Each edition carries the city’s palette, taken here straight from the neon; notes on sourcing at this scale, and what it takes to furnish a thousand rooms at once; and a letter to the city at the back.