Taking a page from Venturi, Scott-Brown’s “Learning from Las Vegas”

            Having the chance to run up and down the entire length of Edsa the past few weeks, I’ve sensed a few ambient urban patterns that could be hyperlinked in terms of context to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown’s landmark book “Learning from Las Vegas.” The book was written back in the 70s during the height of Vegas’ sleazier age, wherein casino entertainment usually involved strippers and some hot starlet; instead of the more common Cirque du Soleil or Siegfried and Roy spectacle. The book talks about how the entire strip is “designed” to be experienced from a car, running at 40 or 50 miles per hour. Big signs, bright lights and oceans of asphalt parking lots served as attractions for motorists to stop by and indulge their senses and consumerist risk-taking within the monotonous book-case casinos-hotels.

 

            Come to think of it, Edsa, our metropolis main spine, acts and behaves the same way. People do not experience Edsa on foot, in fact, people try to avoid the “on-foot” scenario as much as possible. The succession of huge, flashy and creative billboards are all meant to capture your attention within the short span of time that 40-60 kph affords you. In fact, for a driver, it’s a bit frustrating, because the whole experience of Edsa is lost to the chore of maneuvering past the crazy busses.

 

            Effectively, we have a river of cars with a canyon of inaccessible mass-transit, with sidewalks-turned-into-perpendicular-parking spaces. If Edsa were a story line, we would have the Guadalupe bridge crossing as our climax, with the rest of the long road relegated to rising/falling and recurring actions. Well, why not? If Paris has the Champs Elysees, with its lined vistas and radial corridors, lining up the Place dela Concorde, the Louvre, the Arc du Triomphe and the Grand Arche La Defense, why cant we have a succession of huge signage walls/landmarks strung along our main spine?

 

The strip’s parking lots have now been converted into crazy pedestrian attractions/3d vehicular signages, the pirate battles, the dancing fountains, the man-made mountains, the volcanic eruptions… all of these are experienced both ways, on foot, and within a car. The huge neon 2d signage bulkheads have gone down and have been relegated to seedier sides of town, with the casinos pooling together to stitch a monorail system for mass transit.

 

            Of course, in terms of urban scale, the strip and Edsa are virtually miles apart considering that  the strip only strings together several large parcels of land, while Edsa stretches and tries to stitch together our sprawled/far-flung metropolis, and given this, its an even bigger task to fix just this one of our many urban corridors. Well I’m hopeful and I’m idealistic, both are relative luxuries that I can afford, considering that our urban domain evolves at a snail’s pace, I will be watching and doing my share, along with my generation of designers/architects and frustrated urban bystanders.

 

            One thing’s for sure, our city is still in its pubescent stages, and the allure and rush of knee-jerk capitalism has surely screwed up any sense of urbanity in its present stage, but if Vegas was able to evolve its strip from a sleazy, parking-lot connector in the middle of the desert, why can’t we? I don’t want to oversimplify it, but our metropolis will continue to be a fragmented and tattered mess until our political/geographical battle lines are erased and unified as a whole, with a coherent development strategy.