Also presented are spectacular renovations for the Frank Furness library building at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard's Memorial Hall and designs for houses, exhibitions, fabrics, furniture, and decorative items. The catalog, written by the architects, focuses on important aspects of their practice in the late 1980s and the 1990s, notably the juxtaposition of a "hype" sensibility in decoration - manifested in large-scale LED signs and colorful supergraphics - and a generic architecture. The introductory essay, by Stanislaus von Moos, discusses five major themes in Venturi and Scott Brown's architecture: its dialogue with their hometown, Philadelphia, as both a national shrine and a center of architectural innovation; the importance of the American campus as a model for planning and design; organicism as a source of their design theory; the role of realism and abstraction in the firm's architecture; and the Venturis' recent interest in Japan and its traditions.

The observer-designer-theorists who analyzed the Las Vegas strip as an archetype in "Learning from Las Vegas" now turn their iconoclastic vision onto their own remarkable partnership and the rule-breaking architecture it has spawned for this fascinating retrospective of their life work.

Foreword by Arthur Drexler. Introduction by Vincent Scully.

"In 1968, American architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour joined together with students from Yale University and took on Las Vegas as a subject of research. The group spent three weeks in libraries, four days in Los Angeles, and ten days in Las Vegas. The research led to the 1972 publication of the seminal architectural theory treatise Learning from Las Vegas. Photography and film were employed equally within as means of argumentation and representation. The original material has since been stored in the archives of Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates in Philadelphia. The firm has now opened up its archives and made the photographs available." --Book Jacket.

"The exhibition catalogue is published in the form of a guidebook, Your Guide to Downtown Denise Scott Brown. This new book offers a fresh view of Scott Brown's achievements as a preeminent architectural designer, urbanist, theoretician, and teacher. It is a fantastic guide to her life and ideas, it also reveals her humanism, complexity, and wit. Accompanied by previously unpublished material and an extensive conversation with the architect herself the book leads readers through Denise Scott Brown's life and work and explains the genesis of the exhibition". (éditeur).