st desegregated casino — was torn down in May 2009. The Las Vegas celebrated by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and mythologized by the Rat Pack, Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley, can now only be eulogized. Most of the famed casinos featured in Learning from Las Vegas have been imploded, their memories and histories erased almost as easily as the many trailer parks that have been bulldozed as land values skyrocketed. At the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, in 1893, in the celebrated Beaux-Arts “White City” on the Midway, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner lectured on the “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” defining it as the “meeting point between savagery and civilization,” and lamenting that the Census Bureau had declared the frontier officially “closed.” 2 In today’s Las Vegas, the New Frontier — one of the last surviving mid-century casinos — was demolished to make way for a multibillion dollar “French Renaissance” resort modeled on New York City’s Plaza Hotel. 3 With this ironic echo of the White City, we might declare the “closing” of the postwar city that so fascinated Venturi and Scott Brown. As if this were not enough, the extravagant $8.6-billion CityCenter complex, a joint venture of MGM Mirage and Dubai World that is about to open on the Strip, has been being marketed with the tagline “Into the New.” In a place where people gamble on the future to recoup past losses, the stakes are always exceedingly high. The American West, Limerick has written, “has long been home to a cult of ruins,” but this cult has little purchase in the Las Vegas Valley. It is fitting that Las Vegas’s first building by a signature architect is the Lou Ruvo Institute, designed by Frank Gehry, and dedicated to the study of Alzheimer’s disease.
Las Vegas is located in the Mojave, one of the great deserts of North America, and the expanding city and the desert ecosystem reveal interconnected contradictions. There is the spectacle of the Strip and the dreariness of the everyday city that surrounds it; there are landscapes of success and landscapes of failure; there is the erasure of the past in search of an ever-new future. These contradictions prompt profound concern for the meaning of place. Environmentalists have been hoping that economic downturn would spur reflection and readjustment. Alas, the major players of the American Southwest seem unwilling to forsake the dictum of growth-for-growth’s-sake. Large real estate companies, having already secured or entitled hundreds or thousands of acres, remain politically powerful; too often sustainable development means “sustaining development.” Even as financial markets were collapsing in late 2008, developers were seeking approval of new developments as neighboring ones slid into foreclosure and bankruptcy.
Our photo-documentation probes the mechanisms and forces driving the complex transitions of the Mojave Desert. The terrain will be familiar to historians of the west. To others it might provide the threshold to a land in which simple visual power often conceals complicated and troubled histories.
The historian John Beck notes that in the Christian and Hebrew traditions the desert is depicted as a land of “otherworldliness,” of “emptiness,” and thus a “venue for unhindered experimentation, a testing ground both physical and spiritual.” 4 The empty desert becomes either a place of “escape from modernity, an elemental alternative to the rational order of ‘civilized’ life,” or else it represents “the chaos of an unordered primal ‘nature’ that must be resisted and expunged. … [A]s the American desert lies within the economically emergent post–World War II ‘New West,’ the desert can increasingly be seen as representative of aspects of contemporary capitalism: a space without boundaries, unhindered and unregulated by old practices and habits.” 5
A great deal has been projected into this space “without boundaries, unhindered and unregulated.” Northern Nevada was the site of the great Comstock Lode and — as with the recent real estate bonanza — many of the miner