Glitzy spectacle in desert is ‘the unprecedented city’

By Brendan Buhler

Friday, April 3, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Stefan Al is Dutch by birth, an architect by training and a student at the University of California, Berkeley, where he lives. But he’s getting his doctorate in Vegas.

Well, on Vegas.

Technically, it’s a doctorate in city and regional planning. But his forthcoming dissertation is titled “Virtual Urbanism: Las Vegas and the Construction of Spectacle.” Like we said, he’s getting a Ph.D. in Vegas.

And it is Vegas, not Las Vegas, that he studies. He’s interested in the Strip, which he says is best compared with 19th-century Paris — a gaudy promenade of spectacle and consumption.

Take the story of the Eiffel Towers — Paris’ and our knockoff.

The tower in France was designed and built as an attraction for the World’s Fair of 1889. It was pure, functionless spectacle, designed to last only 20 years. It was derided as tacky. But over the years, people found beauty in it (and even a few uses for it — as a radio broadcasting tower, a platform for scientific experiments, a military dispatch post and as a giant, illuminated advertisement for Citroen automobiles). The Eiffel Tower became a revered icon of French culture and art.

And 110 years after the original was built, it was recreated at one-half scale in Las Vegas.

Finally, the Eiffel Tower was a tacky display again.

To talk about the Strip, Al uses academic phrases such as “the now paradigmatic space of spectacle,” “hyper-designed” or “commodity fetishism.” (That last term is from Marx.)

Here’s another one: “the unprecedented city.” Built with unbelievable speed and with few natural resources, fueled by vice and advertising, we’re a city willing to try every scheme and then tear it all down and start anew — we’re a model for boomtowns the world over, Al says.

As an architect, Al recently worked for clients in Guangzhou, China. They wanted fountains like the Bellagio’s and a revolving restaurant like the Stratosphere’s. They wanted Vegas.

“City planners typically dismiss it. Architects typically dismiss it. It’s developers who look to Las Vegas, because they want to make as much money as they can as quickly as possible, even if it’s not sustainable,” Al says.

A postindustrial, man-made environment, a defiance of nature, the id of America writ small — OK, so we’re a nice place to study, but would Al want to live here?

Al actually has. He spent three months here last summer, reading the Vegas theories of late UNLV professor Hal Rothman and staying in a little apartment on Koval Lane, behind the MGM Grand. His roommates were a gambler, a club promoter and a bartender. It was the first time he had absolutely needed an air conditioner to live. And a car — he felt “like an outlaw” if he walked anywhere off-Strip.

“I personally would not like to live this,” Al said.

But he’ll be back.

When Al started his doctoral thesis work three years ago, his subject was Las Vegas as spectacle triumphant. That was before the condo craze crashed, before banks foreclosed on casino projects and before buildings were left standing, half finished. And who knows where it will all end?

So Al’s dissertation is taking a late-course correction, he says.

“Now I’m just looking for a good moment to end it.”