Learning from Las Vegas (1972) by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour grew out of a Yale architecture studio that documented the Las Vegas commercial strip with photographs, plans and analytical diagrams. The authors argued that architects should learn from the existing built environment, including the signs, parking lots and roadside symbolism that modernism dismissed. They distinguished the decorated shed from the duck and defended what they called the ugly and ordinary against heroic high-modernist form. Communication and symbolism, they held, mattered as much as space and structure.
It became a founding text of architectural postmodernism and legitimised the serious study of the everyday, commercial and vernacular landscape. By taking ordinary American urbanism seriously, it widened the scope of what planners and architects considered worthy of analysis.