From Las Vegas to Rome, fifty years later: photographs by Iwan Baan

There is no doubt that, in the history of contemporary architecture, there is a before and an after Learning from Las Vegas. Authored by Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour, the revolutionary book has been revered by many and furiously attacked by just as many since its release in 1972. Its pages, wittingly provocative and irreverent, have in fact broadened the discourse on architecture and the city beyond the traditional elements and reassuring territories of modern narrative, including in the conversation the wild growth of suburban areas, the informality and fragmentation of the recent urban expansions, the non-codified and yet tangible role that communication, commercial dynamics and economic power have on the shape of the objects we inhabit.

Among the many events celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the publication, the American Academy in Rome enters the debate with an original contribution. Iwan Baan, the award-winning architectural photographer, was invited by Lindsay Harris, interim Andrew Heiskell Arts Director of the American Academy in Rome, to question the analyses and urban visions developed by Scott Brown and Venturi first in Italy (during their formative trips) and then in the United States (through their research projects). Baan’s task was to manipulate and update these visions by training his lens on the cities of Rome and Las Vegas today.

Iwan Baan's works are appreciated worldwide for their contamination of different languages, and the curiosity for the ever-surprising interaction between the human figure and architectural and urban spaces. The images for From Las Vegas to Rome are no exception: the exhibition puts on display photographs of different formats, produced in the summer of 2022, which fill the two rooms of the American Academy gallery, and, like telescopes, teleport the visitor from one city to another, with narrow eye level shots as well as wide aerial images captured during helicopter flights.

The Las Vegas that Baan captures does not seem to have strayed too far from the 1970s object of investigation by Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour. The Dutch photographer’s eyes were drawn to the overlapping of architectural layers (fences, historicist facades, curtain walled skyscrapers), decorative layers (plasterboard reproductions of Renaissance or Baroque ornaments, or of a gently cloudy sky), and human layers (homeless people, alienated gamblers, sloppy tourists, tackily overdressed wedding guests). Las Vegas is the realm of the possible against conventions, the triumph of the icon beyond the concepts of authenticity and counterfeit. With all its artificial gimmicks, the city asserts that if something exists, then it is real. Learning from Scott Brown, Venturi and Izenour, Las Vegas becomes an a priori valid city, notwithstanding its inner contradictions.

If Las Vegas is a confirmation, when Baan turns his lens towards Rome, something unexpected happens. As we know, the imaginary of Rome as the ideal city has been celebrated for centuries in its identity and most recognizable elements of its heritage. And yet, the Rome of 2022 immortalized by Baan, although charged with the expressive power of historical forms impossible to obliterate or diminish, is nevertheless an overcrowded city, gasping in its summer heat, suffocated by mass tourism. A city that, behind its marble facades, looks shabby, dirty, almost tired of its own image. Without being judgmental or disrespectful, Iwan Baan records a city whose atmosphere works as a commercial brand, and whose very appearance becomes a majestic backdrop for ad campaigns, tourist snapshots, phone’s selfies.

Zooming in and out from Rome to Las Vegas and back, the visitors of the exhibition are captivated by the different elements characterizing the cities, but, at the same time, are left mesmerized by the shocking similarities between the two. The most recent phases of their urban evolution, indeed, are the ones most affected by tourism and mass consumption, complex and pervasive phenomena that, on the flat surface of Baan's pictures, effectively merge the experience of the Italian capital with the one of the Nevada city. Against the architectural background, Baan shows bodies in motion: an improvised fashion runway on the Spanish Steps, a man dressed as Elvis Presley coming out of a parking lot, a guy savoring his gelato while sitting on a travertine sculptural detail. Baan de-monumentalizes architectural works, emphasizing their contamination with reality, with the untidiness of contemporary lifestyle.

If Las Vegas remains consistent with itself, it becomes increasingly difficult (and Baan confirms this frustrating feeling) to make our idealization of Rome adhere to what the center of the city has become today. A place which seems relegated to the role of a sad, chaotic, and incoherent amusement park inspired by the theme of “Roma storica”, historic Rome.