Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of common people and less immodest in their erections of heroic, self-aggrandizing monuments.

This revision includes the full texts of Part I of the original, on the Las Vegas strip, and Part II, Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed, a generalization from the findings of the first part on symbolism in architecture and the iconography of urban sprawl. (The final part of the first edition, on the architectural work of the firm Venturi and Rauch, is not included in the revision.) The new paperback edition has a smaller format, fewer pictures, and a considerably lower price than the original. There are an added preface by Scott Brown and a bibliography of writings by the members of Venturi and Rauch and about the firm's work.

First published in 1966, and since translated into 16 languages, this remarkable book has become an essential document of architectural literature. A gentle manifesto for a nonstraightforward architecture, Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture expresses in the most compelling and original terms the postmodern rebellion against the purism of modernism. Three hundred and fifty architectural photographs serve as historical comparisons and illuminate the author's ideas on creating and experiencing architecture. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was the winner of the Classic Book Award at the AIA's Seventh Annual International Architecture Book Awards.

Robert Venturi exploded onto the architectural scene in 1966 with a radical call to arms in Complexity and Contradiction. Further accolades and outrage ensued in 1972 when Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (along with Steven Izenour) analyzed the Las Vegas strip as an archetype in Learning from Las Vegas. Now, for the first time, these two observer-designer-theorists turn their iconoclastic vision onto their own remarkable partnership and the rule-breaking architecture it has informed.

The views of Venturi and Scott Brown have influenced architects worldwide for nearly half a century. Pluralism and multiculturalism; symbolism and iconography; popular culture and the everyday landscape; generic building and electronic communication are among the many ideas they have championed. Here, they present both a fascinating retrospective of their life work and a definitive statement of its theoretical underpinnings.

Accessible, informative, and beautifully illustrated, Architecture as Signs and Systems is a must for students of architecture and urban planning, as well as anyone intrigued by these seminal cultural figures. Venturi and Scott Brown have devoted their professional lives to broadening our view of the built world and enlarging the purview of practitioners within it. By looking backward over their own life work, they discover signs and systems that point forward, toward a humane Mannerist architecture for a complex, multicultural society.

A fascimile edition of the long-out-of-print large-format edition designed by design icon Muriel Cooper.

Upon its publication by the MIT Press in 1972, Learning from Las Vegas was immediately influential and controversial. The authors made an argument that was revolutionary for its time--that the billboards and casinos of Las Vegas were worthy of architectural attention--and offered a challenge for contemporary architects obsessed with the heroic and monumental. The physical book itself, designed by MIT's iconic designer Muriel Cooper, was hailed as a masterpiece of modernist design, but the book's design struck the authors as too monumental for a text that praised the ugly and ordinary over the heroic and monumental. The MIT Press published a revised version in 1977--a modest paperback that the authors felt was more in keeping with the argument of the book--and the original Cooper-designed book fell out of print and became a highly sought-after collectors' item; it now sells for thousands of dollars in the rare book market, while the author-redesigned paperback has remained continuously in print at a price affordable to students. Now, decades after the original hardcover edition sold out, the MIT Press is publishing a facsimile edition of the original large-format Cooper-designed edition of Learning from Las Vegas, complete with translucent glassine wrap. This edition also features a spirited preface by Denise Scott Brown, looking back on the creation of the book and explaining her and Robert Venturi's reservations about the original design.

Learning from Las Vegas begins with the Las Vegas Strip and proceeds to Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed, on symbolism in architecture and the iconography of urban sprawl. As Scott Brown says in her introduction, the book upended sacred cows ... would not bad-mouth bad taste, and redefined architectural research.

Aparecido por primera vez en 1966, Complejidad y contradicció n en la arquitectura es uno de los textos de teorí a de la arquitectura má s importantes de la segunda mitad del siglo XX y uno de los primeros en cuestionar de una forma global y contundente las ideas y los preceptos del movimiento moderno. A partir del estudio y de la evidencia de cientos de obras de la historia de la arquitectura, en este implacable alegato Venturi desmitificó algunos de los presupuestos asumidos por la arquitectura moderna al poner en tela de juicio ciertas nociones del racionalismo -- como la simplificació n, la coherencia o la tabla rasa respecto a la tradició n-- e introducir otros conceptos, hasta entonces insó litos, como la complejidad y la contradicció n.

Amerikanische Originalausgabe erschienen im Museum of Modern Art, New York 1966

Amerikanische Originalausgabe erschienen bei The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1978

Ausgangspunkt fur diese Veroffentlichung, die sich schon lange zu einem Klassiker der Architekturtheorie entwickelt hat, war ein Seminar mit dem Titel -Learning from Las Vegas, or Form Analysis as Design Research- an der Fakultat fur Kunst und Architektur der Yale University 1968.

Robert Venturi gehort zu den Architekten, die die Debatte uber die Asthetik der Architektur durch Schriften und eigene Projekte wieder in Gang gebracht haben. Sein Buch ist ein Pladoyer zur Wiederaneignung des mannigfaltigen Reichtums der Baukunst, ein Damm gegen die Sintflut von Funktionalitat und Purismus.