A building can carry meaning in two ways: as a duck, whose whole form is shaped into a symbol, or as a decorated shed, a plain, efficient shelter with symbols applied to it. Prefer the shed.
Rules · Cities · Ornament · Site
On the Strip, the sign is bigger than the building
Where a building is seen from a moving car across a car park, communication depends on large signs placed at the road, and the building behind them can be a simple shed.
Studying the Las Vegas Strip in 1968, the authors found a landscape organised not by enclosed space, as in a traditional town, but by symbols in space: towering signs visible from a distance at 50 kilometres an hour, then the car park, then low buildings. The lesson they drew was that architecture is a form of communication, and that it had much to learn from commercial vernacular that architects despised.
Related rules
Speak two languages at once: the technical language of modern construction for the profession, and a language of familiar, historical or popular signs for everyone else.
Do not design the buildings; write a code. Give each lot a building type, and for each type fix on one sheet where the building stands, how high it rises, where its porch and outbuilding go, whether it may have a tower and where cars are parked; then let any architect design within it.
Bring every house forward to the street with a front porch, and mark the lot line with a white picket fence, each house with a different pattern of fence; build in wood with pitched metal roofs, and allow a small tower where the code permits.
Make neighbourhoods compact, pedestrian-friendly and mixed in use, with a clear centre and edge, so that daily needs lie within a short walk: about a quarter of a mile, five minutes, from centre to edge.
centre to edge ≈ ¼ mile ≈ 400 m ≈ 5 minutes on foot
Give civic buildings and public places the important sites (the heads of streets, the edges of squares, the ends of vistas) so that they reinforce the identity of the community.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “On the Strip, the sign is bigger than the building”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/sign-over-building. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.