Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary

Venturi and Denise Scott Brown is a forestalling of a split between two paratextual realities – of first edition and of revised edition, which was designed by Scott Brown. In this sense, the exhibition’s break from the book – its offering of a before the after – opens up to the textual materialities (the stuff of graphic design, layout, cropping, and everything that made the first and second editions possible as books) that, however innocently, it seeks to negate. Exhibitions are not books, but, here, can lead us back to the book’s object qualities. I want to note, however, that the downgrade of the letter is not complete, nor could it be. While the exhibition effectively dislodges the image from the text found in the book, viewers are reminded of the realm of the typographic, as evidenced by a superabundance of lit and unlit neon signs. The studio compiled information that reflects Las Vegas untamed: economics, land use, activities on and around the Strip, movement (auto, mass-transit, and pedestrian), volume and flow of traffic, and both business and recreation. The archive doesn’t quite match the unruliness of Las Vegas, but Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archive of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown closely approximates its sensory overload.