In 2022, 50 years after Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and Steven Izenour declared in their influential book Learning from Las Vegas that the desert town was to the Strip what Rome is to the Piazza, the American Academy of Rome debuted the exhibition From Las Vegas to Rome, exploring dialogues between these two cities through images taken by Dutch photographer Iwan Baan. This traveling exhibition is opening for the first time in the US in a new iteration on view at the Princeton University School of Architecture from August 6 through September 10, 2025.
In an inversion of Brown, Venturi, and Izenour’s notion to look from the Eternal City to Sin City to reimagine the field of architecture, this show turns to the spectacle of Las Vegas to rethink Rome–both urban centers that lie at the intersection of power and play.
