The New York Times, March 30, 1997, A&L, pp. 1, 38.
Living With the Fake, and Liking It
Surrogate experience and synthetic settings are now an
acceptable, even preferred, way of American life.
We are what we build; stone and steel do not lie. But the
way we perceive and understand physical reality has
radically changed.
By Ada Louise Huxtable
I do not know when we lost our sense of reality or our
interest in it, but at some point it was decided that reality
was not the only option. It was possible, permissible and even
desirable to improve on it, one could substitute a more
agreeable product. Architecture and the environment as
packaging or playacting, as disengagement from reality, is a
notion whose time, alas, seems to have come. Give or take
demolition and natural disasters, architecture is the most
immediate, expressive and lasting art to ever record the human
condition. Cities are the containers and generators of our
history and culture. We are what we build; stone and steel do
not lie. But there has been a radical change in the way we
perceive and understand this physical reality.
Surrogate experience and synthetic settings have become the
preferred American way of life. Environment is entertainment
and artifice; it is the theme park with the enormously
profitable real-estate bottom line and a stunning record as
the country's biggest growth industry. Build an "enclave" of
old buildings moved out of the path of development, and you
have the past; build a mall and multiplex, and you have the
future. Build a replica of New York in Las Vegas as a
skyscraper casino with Coney Island rides and you have a
crowd-pleaser without the risk of a trip to the Big Apple.
Distinctions are no longer made or deemed necessary between
the real and the false; the edge usually goes to the latter,
as an improved version with defects corrected--accessible and
user-friendly. As usual, it is California that sets the trends
and establishes the values for the rest of the country. Only
a Californian would observe that it is becoming increasingly
difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake. All fakes
are clearly not equal; there are good fakes and bad fakes. The
standard is no longer real versus phony but the relative
merits of the imitation. What makes the good ones better is
their improvement on reality.
The real fake reaches its apogee in places like Las Vegas,
where it has been developed into an art form. Continuous,
competitive frontages of moving light and color and constantly
accelerating novelty lead to the gaming tables and hotels. The
purpose is clear and the solution is dazzling, the result is
completely and sublimely itself. The outrageously fake fake
has developed its own indigenous style and life style to
become a real place. This is an urban design frontier where
extraordinary things are happening.
The Los Angeles architect Jon Jerde, an established master of
the modern shopping mall and all its clones and offspring,
understands this transformation well. Using a salesman's pitch
and psychologist's insights he speaks of "place making," in
which advanced technology and programmed perceptions are used
for unprecedented solutions and sensations. The dream of
pedestrianism, so valiantly and fruitlessly pursued by
planners who have looked to the past and overseas for models
of historic hill towns and plazas, has been aggressively
naturalized; the social stroll has become a sensuous assault.
In a Jerde makeover, a 1,400-foot-long, 90-foot-high arched
space frame spans Las Vegas's Fremont Street--the original,
now dated Strip--wrapping the nighttime walker in a
computer-generated sound and light show provided by 211
million lights and a 540,000-watt sound system. This "Fremont
Street experience" is billed as "a linear urban theater for
pedestrians along the city's familiar icon and historic
heart."
Yes, Virginia, Las Vegas has a historic heart; you are too
young to remember, but Fremont Street was invented and
incorporated in 1905. More than 90 years old now, and getting
a little tired, it is part of historic America along with
Williamsburg and more recent landmarks like Route 66, the Mom
and Pop motel and the earliest golden arches of McDonald's.
The street is still evolving in a uniquely American way. It
would be a mistake, as the Swiss philosopher and student of
American urbanism Andre Corboz has pointed out, to mistake Las
Vegas for Monte Carlo. A singular confluence of desire, flash
and the big sell has created its character and destiny. Built
to be exactly what it is, this is the real, real fake at the
highest, loudest and most authentically inauthentic level of
illusion and invention. It must be understood on its own
terms.
Since gambling has been renamed gaming (another triumph of
still another uniquely American phenomenon, public relations),
and thus cleansed of all pejorative connotations and rendered
euphemistically harmless, it has emerged at the top of the
list of America's favorite pastimes. Today, Las Vegas and
Atlantic City (one offers the desert and the other the ocean
to those who venture outdoors) are being touted as family
vacation spots.
It has finally come together: the lunar theatrical landscape
of the Strip and the casino hotels, the amusement park and the
shopping mall, all themed and prefabricated and available as
a packaged vacation for all. Morris Lapidus's Miami hotels of
the 1950's--the unforgettable gilded excesses of the
faux-French Fontainebleau and the sluggish crocodiles in the
equally faux jungle under the Americana's lobby stairs--have
evolved into the breath-stopping extravaganzas of Caesar's
Palace with its heroic Styrofoam statuary and the Luxor's
Sphinx and mirror-glass pyramid.
The latest drop-dead entry in this pantheon of exuberant
terminal pretense is New York, New York, a hotel and casino
complex designed as a pastiche of New York's most famous
buildings; a collage of pin-striped towers makes its
wonderfully improbable facade.
In front of this mirage-melange of skyscrapers is a dotty row
of older New York landmarks, side by side, almost holding
hands--Grant's Tomb, Ellis Island, Grand Central Terminal, the
Brooklyn Bridge and SoHo's cast-iron Haughwout store (a dead
giveaway that some real New York architecture buffs have been
at work) all laced together with the airy, looping curves of
a giant roller coaster. The architects, Gaskin & Bezanski,
working with the firm of Yates-Silverman, seem to have
perfected the genre of inspired looniness and outer-edge
spectacle of the best of these undertakings.
The family that games together also shops together in the
Forum Shops, a 250,000-square-foot addition to Caesar's World,
where moving sidewalks take them through six triumphal arches
rising from cascading fountains into the streets of stores.
"Your typical Roman via," the critic Aaron Betsky reported on
the occasion of the grand opening in 1992, "where the sun sets
and rises on an electronically controlled cycle, continually
bathing acres of faux finishes in rosy hues. Animatronic
robots welcome you with a burst of lasers, and a rococo
version of the Fountain of the Four Rivers drowns out the
sound of nearby slots. In Las Vegas, "history repeats itself
neither as farce nor as tragedy but as a themed environment."
Once the substitute, or surrogate, is considered the more
acceptable experience, remarkable things occur. There are rain
forests in Las Vegas that casino guests find infinitely more
impressive than the South American variety; they prefer the
combination of tropicana and silks (the trade name for false
foliage) with the added attraction of live white tigers.
In Texas, when movie makers planned a film about the Alamo and
found the real landmark small and unprepossessing, they built
a bigger and better Alamo in a nearby town. Today both the
false and the genuine Alamo are equally popular tourist
attractions. (If one is good, two are better. And the new,
improved version is best of all.) A start has been made on
taking the pressure off national parks by bringing tourists to
a high-tech show-and-tell presentation of Zion Park, with a
drive-by en route; one can experience it all that way and
still get to Vegas by night.
Nor are the fine distinctions between the real fake and the
fake fake always clear. The surrogate version is rarely
sublime; more often it is a reduced and emptied-out idea based
on what Corboz has called the "poverty of the re-invention of
the not known." Surprisingly, it is only in the free-wheeling
and not too fussy commercial world that the substitute comes
off. At a higher level, confusion is encouraged in a much more
subtle and insidious and dangerous way. In the world of art
and scholarship, where they really know the difference, there
is a growing interdependence of the real and the fake, with a
disturbing identification of the values of the original and
the copy. The slippage is taking place at institutional and
cultural sources that have always been the defenders and
keepers of authenticity.
Museums, dependent on tourism, must compete for attendance
with entertainment-geared attractions. That takes a lot of
hype and high-class souvenirs in the gift shop.
The art, science and culture museum of the University of
California at Berkeley, located not in Berkeley but in the
affluent suburb of Blackhawk, augmented a 1991 show of New
Guinea artifacts with a "science theater," where an experience
called Nature's Fury produced a rocking earthquake simulation
from a mini-volcano; going a step further for "lifelike"
relevance appropriate to the community, a suggested survivor's
kit was displayed in the trunk of a BMW. Life-size scenes in
narrative settings subordinate the thing itself to a dramatic
recreation. With nothing to recommend them except their often
shabby authenticity, the real objects simply have less appeal
than snappy simulations.
While art museums are more removed from the tourist track
where "the world's great masterpieces" are re-created in
everything from living tableaux to glow-in-the-dark copies on
velvet, even the primary citadels have not escaped the trend.
High art has been "contaminated"--this is the semiotician and
novelist Umberto Eco's word; no one else would dare use it--by
the "blurring of the boundaries" of original and reproduction.
It is common practice for originals, reconstructions and
reproductions to be mingled in an effort to bring museum
displays "to life"; one must read the exhibition labels to
know what is real and what is not.
The leveling of the works of art with copies for sale in the
museum shop is omnipresent. The ostensible purpose of the
reproduction, to make one want the original, has been
supplanted by the feeling that the original is no longer
necessary. The copy is considered just as good and, in some
cases, better; Eco and the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard
both argue that the simulation replaces the original to become
the reality in most minds, even if this is not overtly
expressed, and even in those places meant to guard the
uniqueness and the meaning of the world of art.
According to the American cultural historian Margaret Crawford
and Richard Sennett, the novelist and sociologist who
specializes in the philosophical and symbolic aspects of
urbanism, there is a relationship between the museum shop and
that feature of mall salesmanship called "adjacent
attraction." In both the commercial and the cultural setting,
there is a transfer of values, from real objects of esthetic
and historical validity to lesser products.
Even when direct copies are not involved, the frequent use of
real objects as promotional devices raises the price and
perception of the thing for sale, through the kind of
association that "blurs the boundaries," as Eco expressed it.
But the process also works both ways. The commodity (for a
price) becomes identified with the qualities of the object (no
price, or even, in the case of artworks, priceless), so that
the same value is given to both.
The blurring of the boundaries has now become a constant in
scholarship and connoisseurship. The computer substitutes the
picture on the screen for the original work of art. Because
the computer and the camera have made available an incredible
array of research sources, arcane problems can be explored as
never before; scholars can deal with masses of data and remote
collections of awe-inspiring completeness and diversity. This
is one of the seductive miracles of the electronic age. Entire
dissertations can be written without ever seeing the
originals. Access is increasingly limited to the fragile
drawings, documents and rare books that are primary resources.
Since this is the point of scholarship where the eye is
trained, the loss of direct contact is incalculable. It is
through the immediate visual and sensory response engendered
by repeated exposure to the actual work of art that
connoisseurship is created--the related sequence of close
knowledge and informed taste by which works of art can be
accurately understood, compared, defined, judged and enjoyed.
There is no replacement for this primary experience--the
direct connection with the hand of the artist in the actual
touch of the pen or the stroke of the brush--no matter how
technically perfect the reproduction.
Eco of the impeccable, bemused and outraged eye has given the
subject of authenticity an unexpected and very important spin.
Rather than liking reality or the real thing too little, he
says, Americans love it too much. We are obsessed with
reality, with the possession of the object, determined to have
it at any cost, in the most immediate and tangible form,
unconcerned with authenticity or the loss of historical,
cultural or esthetic meaning. This pervasive attitude,
established through a massive popular network, has "spread to
the products of high culture and the entertainment industry,"
Eco notes, where the relationship among values, judgment and
authenticity has virtually ceased to exist.
The theme park has no such problem of degenerative
authenticity. Nothing in it is admired for its reality, only
for the calculated manipulation and simulation of its sources.
It is not surprising that much of the most popular and
profitable development of the genre is spearheaded and
bankrolled by the masters of illusion; the movie and
entertainment businesses have become the major innovators and
investors in theme parks and related enterprises.
An entire industry has sprung up to serve themed
entertainment, providing those erupting volcanoes and
fiberglass rock formations on the grounds of Las Vegas
casinos; according to an industry spokesman "you get a very
artificial appearance with real rock." Those who wonder what
happened to, American know-how have just not been looking in
the right places.
With reality voided and illusion preferred, almost anything
can have uncritical acceptance. For those without memory,
nostalgia fills the void. For those without reference points,
novelties are enough. For those without the standards supplied
by familiarity with the source, knockoffs will do. Escalating
sensation supplants intellectual and esthetic response.
For all of the above, the outrageous is essential. There must
be instant gratification; above all, one must be able to buy
sensation and status; the experience and the products must be
for sale. The remarkable marriage of technologically based and
shrewdly programmed artificial experience with a manufactured
and managed environment, for a real-life substitute of
controlled and pricey pleasures, is a totally American product
and the real American dream.
[Three photos] [1] New York, New York, a new hotel and casino
complex in Las Vegas that opened in January--a crowd-pleasing
example of architecture as playacting, holding none of the
risk to the real city. [2] City Walk at Universal Studios in
Los Angeles, above--A caricature of Main Streets all over
America that cleverly imitates the shopping, eating and
socializing opportunities of real places like [3] Nassau
Street in Manhattan, right.
Copyright (C) 1997 by Ada Louise Huxtable
Ada Louise Huxtable is an architecture critic and historian.
This article is excerpted from her latest book, "The Unreal
America: Architecture and Illusion," to be published next
month by the New Press.
[End]
Living With the Fake, and Liking It
Surrogate experience and synthetic settings are now an
acceptable, even preferred, way of American life.
We are what we build; stone and steel do not lie. But the
way we perceive and understand physical reality has
radically changed.
By Ada Louise Huxtable
I do not know when we lost our sense of reality or our
interest in it, but at some point it was decided that reality
was not the only option. It was possible, permissible and even
desirable to improve on it, one could substitute a more
agreeable product. Architecture and the environment as
packaging or playacting, as disengagement from reality, is a
notion whose time, alas, seems to have come. Give or take
demolition and natural disasters, architecture is the most
immediate, expressive and lasting art to ever record the human
condition. Cities are the containers and generators of our
history and culture. We are what we build; stone and steel do
not lie. But there has been a radical change in the way we
perceive and understand this physical reality.
Surrogate experience and synthetic settings have become the
preferred American way of life. Environment is entertainment
and artifice; it is the theme park with the enormously
profitable real-estate bottom line and a stunning record as
the country's biggest growth industry. Build an "enclave" of
old buildings moved out of the path of development, and you
have the past; build a mall and multiplex, and you have the
future. Build a replica of New York in Las Vegas as a
skyscraper casino with Coney Island rides and you have a
crowd-pleaser without the risk of a trip to the Big Apple.
Distinctions are no longer made or deemed necessary between
the real and the false; the edge usually goes to the latter,
as an improved version with defects corrected--accessible and
user-friendly. As usual, it is California that sets the trends
and establishes the values for the rest of the country. Only
a Californian would observe that it is becoming increasingly
difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake. All fakes
are clearly not equal; there are good fakes and bad fakes. The
standard is no longer real versus phony but the relative
merits of the imitation. What makes the good ones better is
their improvement on reality.
The real fake reaches its apogee in places like Las Vegas,
where it has been developed into an art form. Continuous,
competitive frontages of moving light and color and constantly
accelerating novelty lead to the gaming tables and hotels. The
purpose is clear and the solution is dazzling, the result is
completely and sublimely itself. The outrageously fake fake
has developed its own indigenous style and life style to
become a real place. This is an urban design frontier where
extraordinary things are happening.
The Los Angeles architect Jon Jerde, an established master of
the modern shopping mall and all its clones and offspring,
understands this transformation well. Using a salesman's pitch
and psychologist's insights he speaks of "place making," in
which advanced technology and programmed perceptions are used
for unprecedented solutions and sensations. The dream of
pedestrianism, so valiantly and fruitlessly pursued by
planners who have looked to the past and overseas for models
of historic hill towns and plazas, has been aggressively
naturalized; the social stroll has become a sensuous assault.
In a Jerde makeover, a 1,400-foot-long, 90-foot-high arched
space frame spans Las Vegas's Fremont Street--the original,
now dated Strip--wrapping the nighttime walker in a
computer-generated sound and light show provided by 211
million lights and a 540,000-watt sound system. This "Fremont
Street experience" is billed as "a linear urban theater for
pedestrians along the city's familiar icon and historic
heart."
Yes, Virginia, Las Vegas has a historic heart; you are too
young to remember, but Fremont Street was invented and
incorporated in 1905. More than 90 years old now, and getting
a little tired, it is part of historic America along with
Williamsburg and more recent landmarks like Route 66, the Mom
and Pop motel and the earliest golden arches of McDonald's.
The street is still evolving in a uniquely American way. It
would be a mistake, as the Swiss philosopher and student of
American urbanism Andre Corboz has pointed out, to mistake Las
Vegas for Monte Carlo. A singular confluence of desire, flash
and the big sell has created its character and destiny. Built
to be exactly what it is, this is the real, real fake at the
highest, loudest and most authentically inauthentic level of
illusion and invention. It must be understood on its own
terms.
Since gambling has been renamed gaming (another triumph of
still another uniquely American phenomenon, public relations),
and thus cleansed of all pejorative connotations and rendered
euphemistically harmless, it has emerged at the top of the
list of America's favorite pastimes. Today, Las Vegas and
Atlantic City (one offers the desert and the other the ocean
to those who venture outdoors) are being touted as family
vacation spots.
It has finally come together: the lunar theatrical landscape
of the Strip and the casino hotels, the amusement park and the
shopping mall, all themed and prefabricated and available as
a packaged vacation for all. Morris Lapidus's Miami hotels of
the 1950's--the unforgettable gilded excesses of the
faux-French Fontainebleau and the sluggish crocodiles in the
equally faux jungle under the Americana's lobby stairs--have
evolved into the breath-stopping extravaganzas of Caesar's
Palace with its heroic Styrofoam statuary and the Luxor's
Sphinx and mirror-glass pyramid.
The latest drop-dead entry in this pantheon of exuberant
terminal pretense is New York, New York, a hotel and casino
complex designed as a pastiche of New York's most famous
buildings; a collage of pin-striped towers makes its
wonderfully improbable facade.
In front of this mirage-melange of skyscrapers is a dotty row
of older New York landmarks, side by side, almost holding
hands--Grant's Tomb, Ellis Island, Grand Central Terminal, the
Brooklyn Bridge and SoHo's cast-iron Haughwout store (a dead
giveaway that some real New York architecture buffs have been
at work) all laced together with the airy, looping curves of
a giant roller coaster. The architects, Gaskin & Bezanski,
working with the firm of Yates-Silverman, seem to have
perfected the genre of inspired looniness and outer-edge
spectacle of the best of these undertakings.
The family that games together also shops together in the
Forum Shops, a 250,000-square-foot addition to Caesar's World,
where moving sidewalks take them through six triumphal arches
rising from cascading fountains into the streets of stores.
"Your typical Roman via," the critic Aaron Betsky reported on
the occasion of the grand opening in 1992, "where the sun sets
and rises on an electronically controlled cycle, continually
bathing acres of faux finishes in rosy hues. Animatronic
robots welcome you with a burst of lasers, and a rococo
version of the Fountain of the Four Rivers drowns out the
sound of nearby slots. In Las Vegas, "history repeats itself
neither as farce nor as tragedy but as a themed environment."
Once the substitute, or surrogate, is considered the more
acceptable experience, remarkable things occur. There are rain
forests in Las Vegas that casino guests find infinitely more
impressive than the South American variety; they prefer the
combination of tropicana and silks (the trade name for false
foliage) with the added attraction of live white tigers.
In Texas, when movie makers planned a film about the Alamo and
found the real landmark small and unprepossessing, they built
a bigger and better Alamo in a nearby town. Today both the
false and the genuine Alamo are equally popular tourist
attractions. (If one is good, two are better. And the new,
improved version is best of all.) A start has been made on
taking the pressure off national parks by bringing tourists to
a high-tech show-and-tell presentation of Zion Park, with a
drive-by en route; one can experience it all that way and
still get to Vegas by night.
Nor are the fine distinctions between the real fake and the
fake fake always clear. The surrogate version is rarely
sublime; more often it is a reduced and emptied-out idea based
on what Corboz has called the "poverty of the re-invention of
the not known." Surprisingly, it is only in the free-wheeling
and not too fussy commercial world that the substitute comes
off. At a higher level, confusion is encouraged in a much more
subtle and insidious and dangerous way. In the world of art
and scholarship, where they really know the difference, there
is a growing interdependence of the real and the fake, with a
disturbing identification of the values of the original and
the copy. The slippage is taking place at institutional and
cultural sources that have always been the defenders and
keepers of authenticity.
Museums, dependent on tourism, must compete for attendance
with entertainment-geared attractions. That takes a lot of
hype and high-class souvenirs in the gift shop.
The art, science and culture museum of the University of
California at Berkeley, located not in Berkeley but in the
affluent suburb of Blackhawk, augmented a 1991 show of New
Guinea artifacts with a "science theater," where an experience
called Nature's Fury produced a rocking earthquake simulation
from a mini-volcano; going a step further for "lifelike"
relevance appropriate to the community, a suggested survivor's
kit was displayed in the trunk of a BMW. Life-size scenes in
narrative settings subordinate the thing itself to a dramatic
recreation. With nothing to recommend them except their often
shabby authenticity, the real objects simply have less appeal
than snappy simulations.
While art museums are more removed from the tourist track
where "the world's great masterpieces" are re-created in
everything from living tableaux to glow-in-the-dark copies on
velvet, even the primary citadels have not escaped the trend.
High art has been "contaminated"--this is the semiotician and
novelist Umberto Eco's word; no one else would dare use it--by
the "blurring of the boundaries" of original and reproduction.
It is common practice for originals, reconstructions and
reproductions to be mingled in an effort to bring museum
displays "to life"; one must read the exhibition labels to
know what is real and what is not.
The leveling of the works of art with copies for sale in the
museum shop is omnipresent. The ostensible purpose of the
reproduction, to make one want the original, has been
supplanted by the feeling that the original is no longer
necessary. The copy is considered just as good and, in some
cases, better; Eco and the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard
both argue that the simulation replaces the original to become
the reality in most minds, even if this is not overtly
expressed, and even in those places meant to guard the
uniqueness and the meaning of the world of art.
According to the American cultural historian Margaret Crawford
and Richard Sennett, the novelist and sociologist who
specializes in the philosophical and symbolic aspects of
urbanism, there is a relationship between the museum shop and
that feature of mall salesmanship called "adjacent
attraction." In both the commercial and the cultural setting,
there is a transfer of values, from real objects of esthetic
and historical validity to lesser products.
Even when direct copies are not involved, the frequent use of
real objects as promotional devices raises the price and
perception of the thing for sale, through the kind of
association that "blurs the boundaries," as Eco expressed it.
But the process also works both ways. The commodity (for a
price) becomes identified with the qualities of the object (no
price, or even, in the case of artworks, priceless), so that
the same value is given to both.
The blurring of the boundaries has now become a constant in
scholarship and connoisseurship. The computer substitutes the
picture on the screen for the original work of art. Because
the computer and the camera have made available an incredible
array of research sources, arcane problems can be explored as
never before; scholars can deal with masses of data and remote
collections of awe-inspiring completeness and diversity. This
is one of the seductive miracles of the electronic age. Entire
dissertations can be written without ever seeing the
originals. Access is increasingly limited to the fragile
drawings, documents and rare books that are primary resources.
Since this is the point of scholarship where the eye is
trained, the loss of direct contact is incalculable. It is
through the immediate visual and sensory response engendered
by repeated exposure to the actual work of art that
connoisseurship is created--the related sequence of close
knowledge and informed taste by which works of art can be
accurately understood, compared, defined, judged and enjoyed.
There is no replacement for this primary experience--the
direct connection with the hand of the artist in the actual
touch of the pen or the stroke of the brush--no matter how
technically perfect the reproduction.
Eco of the impeccable, bemused and outraged eye has given the
subject of authenticity an unexpected and very important spin.
Rather than liking reality or the real thing too little, he
says, Americans love it too much. We are obsessed with
reality, with the possession of the object, determined to have
it at any cost, in the most immediate and tangible form,
unconcerned with authenticity or the loss of historical,
cultural or esthetic meaning. This pervasive attitude,
established through a massive popular network, has "spread to
the products of high culture and the entertainment industry,"
Eco notes, where the relationship among values, judgment and
authenticity has virtually ceased to exist.
The theme park has no such problem of degenerative
authenticity. Nothing in it is admired for its reality, only
for the calculated manipulation and simulation of its sources.
It is not surprising that much of the most popular and
profitable development of the genre is spearheaded and
bankrolled by the masters of illusion; the movie and
entertainment businesses have become the major innovators and
investors in theme parks and related enterprises.
An entire industry has sprung up to serve themed
entertainment, providing those erupting volcanoes and
fiberglass rock formations on the grounds of Las Vegas
casinos; according to an industry spokesman "you get a very
artificial appearance with real rock." Those who wonder what
happened to, American know-how have just not been looking in
the right places.
With reality voided and illusion preferred, almost anything
can have uncritical acceptance. For those without memory,
nostalgia fills the void. For those without reference points,
novelties are enough. For those without the standards supplied
by familiarity with the source, knockoffs will do. Escalating
sensation supplants intellectual and esthetic response.
For all of the above, the outrageous is essential. There must
be instant gratification; above all, one must be able to buy
sensation and status; the experience and the products must be
for sale. The remarkable marriage of technologically based and
shrewdly programmed artificial experience with a manufactured
and managed environment, for a real-life substitute of
controlled and pricey pleasures, is a totally American product
and the real American dream.
[Three photos] [1] New York, New York, a new hotel and casino
complex in Las Vegas that opened in January--a crowd-pleasing
example of architecture as playacting, holding none of the
risk to the real city. [2] City Walk at Universal Studios in
Los Angeles, above--A caricature of Main Streets all over
America that cleverly imitates the shopping, eating and
socializing opportunities of real places like [3] Nassau
Street in Manhattan, right.
Copyright (C) 1997 by Ada Louise Huxtable
Ada Louise Huxtable is an architecture critic and historian.
This article is excerpted from her latest book, "The Unreal
America: Architecture and Illusion," to be published next
month by the New Press.
[End]