THESIS WORK / The Generic Spectacle / Kurt Kraler

THESIS WORK features the work emerging from the newly restructured Waterloo Masters of Architecture program which began in the fall term with Thesis Research and Design studios and seminars. The featured work has been selected by the TR+D1 faculty team of Lola Sheppard, Mona El Khafif and Matthew Spremulli.

Over the course of the TR+D1 studio, graduate students developed their individual research topics in preparation for a thesis in architecture. The intention is to establish a theoretical, historical and intellectual framework through a diversity of representational modes; mapping, diagramming, photo essays, writing, which will serve as the foundation for a graduate thesis to be pursued over forthcoming academic terms.

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The Generic Spectacle

The Las Vegas Strip and an Emerging Urban Typology

 

Abstract by Kurt Kraler

Once proclaimed as the vernacular American commercial strip, the Las Vegas Strip has experienced a dramatic transformation as a result of the powerful forces of capitalism and political autonomy. Buildings are constructed, renovated, and imploded at a rapid pace in a push to remain culturally relevant and continue to entice an increasingly international tourist base. The proposed term generic spectacle draws on the writings of Guy Debord and Rem Koolhaas to encapsulate this emerging urban phenomenon.

Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle” warns of the powerful role of the image in modern society, where the representation has come to supersede the represented, resulting in diminished discourse and quality of life. As documented in “Learning from Las Vegas” (1972), this was particularly evident along the Las Vegas Strip at a time when enlarged roadside signs dominated in an effort to attract customers arriving by automobile. The sign would eventually merge with the building, producing immersive spaces and atmospheres, which often emulated far off places and cinematic themes.

Coincidentally, amidst the cacophony of images, the Strip has also come to resemble that of Koolhaas’ the Generic City, an urban typology recognizable through its banality and reckless repetition. The Mojave Desert serves as a tabula rasa to the rapid pace of development, renovation, and implosion that has allowed the Strip to continuously reinvent itself in an effort remain relevant within the highly competitive tourist industry. One wonders, what could be more generic than a urban typology predominantly composed of hotel rooms, itself a kit of parts replicated floor after floor with little variation?

The recent completion of CityCenter in Las Vegas, a massive $8.5 billion development ultimately indistinguishable from any other contemporary North American city, marks a new era in city building. The Las Vegas tradition of erecting kitschy replicas has since been discarded in favour of a more sophisticated theme where the threshold between the original and the reproduction is no longer evident, reflecting Debord’s observation that the image is prevailing.

This thesis will explore the phenomena of the generic spectacle in relationship to the Las Vegas Strip and the resulting architectural and social implications of an increasingly hybridized urban form founded on the basis of an exploitive service economy in order to maintain the illusion of leisure. Discussions of the reciprocal relationship between copies and their originals in the formation of simulacra, as framed by Jean Baudrillard, as well as the influence of such factors as the geo­political history of the region and an underlying military presence in the formation of the generic spectacle.