Denise Scott Brown, Installation view at Palazzo Mora, 2016.

In September 1956, Robert Scott Brown and I arrived in Venice for the CIAM Summer School. We were passionate Modernists who agreed with English New Brutalist ideas for updating the movement. While photographing architecture to support our memories back home in Africa, we fell in love with Venice, and our focus shifted from recording to analyzing.
The city, in gainsaying Modern principles, offered an extension of Brutalist thought. Here time is revealed in brick sizes and combinations in one house mark many eras. Palazzos derailed from their first programs are now museums, galleries, and apartment houses – activities their designers never dreamt of. What gave historic buildings the ability to adapt? How can we design for unpredictable future? Where does change over time leave the concept of functionalism?
Venice urban space is not like Ville Radieuse. Campos and streets are sky-topped outdoor rooms, defined by building fronts. City sectors form islands clustered around the Grand Canal, within a vast Lagoon where space is defined by markers and vistas. We shot street life, circulation, and activities, the givens of urban planning, and pondered earlier dictators of urban form and polity, tides, high water, geography, and economics. Values were revealed in churches and café tables in public squares, retail uses on the Rialto Bridge, private uses of deconsecrated churches, and (once) the Ponte dei Petti’s sirens. This reflected interplays between government, church, and people, IS and OUGHT, real and virtual.
In January 1965, I moved to California and studied Los Angeles, where swift growth, vast space, and automobiles made even Miracle Mile seem like a commercial strip; and Las Vegas, where neon set downtown ablaze but had to extend upward to mark The Strip and its casinos in the Mojave Desert and among seas of cars.
I now photographed more to teach than record, to compare Southwestern auto cities with historic ones and with the Modernist urban visions decried by social planners. I shot commercial architecture built for quick returns, social succession and invasion, machine romanticism, freeway lyricism, violent juxtapositions between freeways, pylons, and rural cottages, symbolic communication by architecture and signage, and interesting activities and ways of life – a mash of 1960's urbanism. Preparing studios, I explored Muscle Beach and The Strip. I practiced the “just shoot!” principal: stop to question your choice of subject and it’ll disappear before you reach it and just as you realize why you want it. Slides were mandatory: students in architecture need concrete examples to understand concepts like “symbol in space before form in space.” My aim was not to answer questions but to help students learn to seek answers.
In 1966, I invited Robert Venturi to see Las Vegas with me. Images are selected to convey our artistic journey “From Rome to Las Vegas” – “Venice to Venice” here. Some appeared later in Learning from Las Vegas but in April 1965, I didn’t know that a studio, let alone a publication, would result. Offered faculty rates, $8 per night, at the new Dunes hotel, I joked “Could Las Vegas be educational?” Fifty years later the question still teases and challenges.