by Olha Romaniuk

Created on: December 14, 2008

The glamour and glitz of Las Vegas was always the main draw for the tourists from all over the United States and even the world. Transcending its original reputation as a seedy gambling mecca, Las Vegas has become nothing short of an multidimensional experience, with restaurants, shopping centers, hotels and night clubs, all catering to a visitor's every whim. The limit to what a tourist can get on his or her trip to Las Vegas is constrained only by the budget and imagination. Gambling is a secondary pass time to those who come to Vegas, with a primary experiential quality being the experiential quality of the overall experience, the fantasy world in which Paris and Venice can coexist together within a few blocks.

Las Vegas is a modern city on steroids, where it never lets its visitors be bored by offering an almost endless array of entertainment options in settings that remind of the most opulent architectural corners of the world. By drawing from its beginnings as a "duck and decorated shed" city that fascinated Robert Venturi to dedicate his entire book "Learning from Las Vegas" to the architecture of the Big Easy. The signage of Las Vegas, as Venturi saw it, was simple, overtaking the high architectural language of seemingly non-referential modern architecture, and speaking to the common people. With its simplicity and unabashed straight forwardness, Las Vegas became a quintessential poster child for the "roadside" architecture, in the most endearing sense of the term.

The iconography of the city developed, evolved, overcomplicated itself. It still took on the notion of the mass appeal, with neon lights and highly recognizable architectural forms. This is what the people wanted - not a morally-entrenched, archispeak-filtered discussion on the appropriateness of architectural forms, but a fantasy world of excess and leisure. They wanted to feel like they can be transported to different parts of the world, without ever leaving the country.

The notion of tourist mass appeal, as dictated by the modern media, brought about changes to most modern cities, with every city's architecture striving to be the first, the best, the tallest, the most luxurious. The consumer draw, learned and studied in Las Vegas, spread out to the other parts of the country, with the "decorated shed" and the "duck" blending together and creating their own hybrid.

Charles Jencks, an important architectural writer, landscape architect and theoretician, wrote of the iconography of places like

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