From Las Vegas to Rome: Iwan Baan

From Las Vegas to Rome

When they published Learning from Las Vegas in 1972, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi revolutionized architecture by claiming that the lessons the American desert town had to offer equaled those of the Eternal City. “Las Vegas is to the Strip what Rome is to the Piazza,” they declared. Organized to mark the fiftieth anniversary of this landmark publication, the exhibition From Las Vegas to Rome explores dialogues between these cities through images taken by Iwan Baan, one of the most prolific photographers active today. 

Inverting the authors’ counsel to look “from Rome to Las Vegas” to update the field of architecture, this exhibition looks at Las Vegas—and its spectacle of improbable buildings and infrastructure—to rethink Rome, a city shaped by power and money for centuries. Baan’s views of Las Vegas and Rome, taken expressly for this occasion, force us to question if we can regard architecture without moral judgment, a perspective Venturi encouraged for Las Vegas, in the ecological and social contexts of the twenty-first century.

Iwan Baan (*1975) is a Dutch architecture and documentary photographer based in Amsterdam. His photographs document the life of architecture around the world, from informal and traditional housing structures to the growth of megacities, and how individuals, communities and societies reappropriate their built environment to make it their own. Baan has worked with leading architects and architecture studios such as Rem Koolhaas/OMA, Herzog & de Meuron, SANAA, Zaha Hadid, Steven Holl and Tatiana Bilbao. His images are regularly published in newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Domus and Architectural Digest. Baan has authored or collaborated on many books, including among them Rome – Las Vegas: Bread and Circuses (Lars Müller Publishers, 2024), African Modernism: The Architecture of Independence (Park Books, 2015/2022), Momentum of Light co-authored with Francis Kéré (2021), and Brasilia – Chandigarh: Living with Modernity (2010/2023). Baan's work has been exhibited internationally, including a touring retrospective exhibition launched at the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein in 2023/2024.

Credits: 
Photographs: Iwan Baan 
First shown at the American Academy in Rome, curated by Lindsay Harris.  
Coordination: Suzanne Tóth-Pál 
Publisher Rome – Las Vegas: Bread and Circuses: Lars Müller Publishers 
Design Rome – Las Vegas: Bread and Circuses: HallerBrun