In 1968, architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown led a studio at Yale to investigate the architecture of the Las Vegas. This was only five years after the dedication of Paul Rudolph’s monumental Art & Architecture Building and four years before Venturi and Scott Brown published the Las Vegas studio’s resultant theoretical provocation, the now-famous Learning from Las Vegas; and 41 years in advance of the current exhibition at the A&A Gallery, which traces the influence of the Las Vegas studio on the design practice of Venturi Scott Brown and Associates (VSBA).

“What We Learned: The Yale Las Vegas Studio and the Work of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates,” which opened Thurs., Oct. 29, returns VSBA’s designs and ideas to the context of the research that inspired them, and houses them within the type of architectural setting they reacted against. Rudolph Hall seems worlds apart from the Las Vegas that was its contemporary. Venturi and Scott Brown noticed the gap. Why, they wondered, did modern architecture seem to have so little to do with current vernacular architecture, and in particular with the automobile-centric design of emerging urban and suburban communities in the American southwest?

Las Vegas lured them, not with its standard temptations, but because there seemed to be no better example of architecture responding to ordinary life in cars. The task of the research studio was to discern just how design in Las Vegas reflected actual, commonplace desires and demands—real culture, low culture, as opposed to a dream of how culture ought to be.

Las Vegas represented reality because it was an exaggeration of the ordinary, whose features could be more clearly discerned in their caricature. Learning from Las Vegas meant deducing the ordinary from the extraordinary, diluting culture from its most concentrated manifestations, finding real life within its most indulgent self-expression.

This equation, the ordinary = reality = culture, allowed Venturi and Scott Brown to challenge the relevance of the formal, educated architecture of their day—well represented at Yale by buildings like A&A, the Yale Art Gallery, Beinecke Library, and Stiles and Morse—which didn’t seem to take this identification seriously or disregarded it altogether.

There is nothing ordinary about the structures that arose from this loftier approach. They strike us as examples of a special kind of building. They contribute to the sense that architecture is an artistic practice with higher aspirations than mere functional construction. Architecture would help to produce the style and taste of its time—the special aesthetic sensibility that we often link to significant cultural expression. But if, as Venturi and Scott Brown contended, Las Vegas presented a superabundance of culture rather than a contemptible lack thereof, then it was architectural modernism that would turn out to be tasteless and out of touch with what was genuine in architecture.

The Las Vegas studio began its work by gathering field evidence to test the suspicion that the vernacular counted as legitimate architecture—that it served a purpose and a culture at least as essential to architecture as modernism and its obsession with form and space. The exhibition makes much of this evidence available. On the outmost walls of the gallery, we see photo after photo of the old Las Vegas’ characteristic forms: a mass of graphic signs lining the road; low buildings, often plain in themselves beneath lavishly applied decoration and further signage; and, night-time artificial lighting so powerful that the camera could capture nothing else.

From the collection of photos we get the distinct impression that buildings were not the point of this architecture, even that this architecture deliberately kept its structures out of sight. Or, at least, the photographers in the Las Vegas studio paid attention to everything that appeared most external to architecture and most opposed to it. They were fascinated by a city that architecture, in its academic sense, hadn’t designed.

Venturi and Scott Brown responded by re-designing architectural theory. The heart of the exhibition, analogously situated at the center of the gallery, is an explanation of what Sin City taught these expert practitioners about the meaning of their profession. A series of free-standing panels arranged in a broken ring present this lesson as an interaction of multiple themes: communication, automobile city, urban mapping and research, mannerism, and context. There’s plenty to read about each of them, and, unlike many shows whose text matters but intrudes, the reading truly suits this exhibition, whose very concern is the relationship between observation, writing, and implementation.

Reading fits the show for another reason: The theme of communication was a central point derived from the Las Vegas research. Las Vegas architecture in the late ’60s was a system of symbols rather than spaces. The architectural forms in Las Vegas recalled, for Venturi, the function of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Gothic ornaments, which is to say, “They were only incidentally art; they were essentially communication.” The slew of signs, decorations, words, and images on the Las Vegas roadside promised pleasures and amenities to potential consumers who comparison- shopped from behind the wheel. Symbolic capacity proved more essential in drawing people to a place than did the building itself, which, again in Venturi’s words, merely “housed activities.”

To the exhibition’s great merit, we can see just how Venturi and Scott Brown understood the significance of communication in architecture because we can examine their projects with this and other themes in mind. Their designs, like the design of Las Vegas, emphasize accommodation to the demands of modern life. They are often, as the architects themselves admit, boring or ugly. And yet we can’t dismiss them. The boring and the ugly become a challenge to monumental structures and formal beauty once architecture needn’t provide more than a shell of symbols with a functional core.

The exhibition doesn’t force us to agree with Venturi and Scott Brown. You can certainly pick out troublesome premises in their work. Why assume, as they seem to, that symbolism and space are drastically different architectural orientations? Is space meaningless? When you’re in the A&A gallery looking down through the glass at other students in the library, does the building itself suggest anything to you? How does it make you move, see, and relate to other people? Even if space does nothing for you, why should we assume that explicit symbolism does any better? Isn’t there something unconvincing and unmoving about the promise of McDonald’s golden arches? How do we decide which symbols matter?

“What We Learned: The Yale Las Vegas Studio and the Work of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates” leaves these questions appropriately open. The exhibition’s concern is to map the development of particular ideas from the site of their formation through the body of work they inspired. The show does justice to that work, while the gallery space provides a constant counterpoint; the tension couldn’t be more satisfying.