The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream
Stefan Al
The MIT Press, March 2017
Hardcover | 8 x 10 inches | 272 pages | 72 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9780262035743 | $34.95

PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
The Las Vegas Strip has impersonated the Wild West, with saloon doors and wagon wheels; it has decked itself out in midcentury modern sleekness. It has illuminated itself with twenty-story-high neon signs, then junked them. After that came Disney-like theme parks featuring castles and pirates, followed by replicas of Venetian canals, New York skyscrapers, and the Eiffel Tower. (It might be noted that forty-two million people visited Las Vegas in 2015?ten million more than visited the real Paris.) More recently, the Strip decided to get classy, with casinos designed by famous architects and zillion-dollar collections of art. Las Vegas became the ?implosion capital of the world? as developers, driven by competition, got rid of the old to make way for the new?offering a non-metaphorical definition of ?creative destruction.? In The Strip, Stefan Al examines the many transformations of the Las Vegas Strip, arguing that they mirror transformations in America itself. The Strip is not, as popularly supposed, a display of architectural freaks but representative of architectural trends and a record of social, cultural, and economic change.  Al tells two parallel stories. He describes the feverish competition of Las Vegas developers to build the snazziest, m...