| Title |
Technological Phenomenology and Urban Experience: Reading Learning from Las Vegas as the Entanglement of Technology and Experience |
| DOI |
https://doi.org/10.5659/JAIK.2022.38.12.205 |
| Keywords |
Urban Experience ; Learning from Las Vegas ; Scott Lash ; Neil Leach ; |
| Abstract |
This paper explores Learning from Las Vegas, the classic text of architecture and postmodernism written by Robert Venturi and Denise
Scott Brown first published in 1972, through Scott Lash notion of technological phenomenology. Lash claims that technology is not so
much an externalized apparatus but rather a form of life in the sense of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy called language game.
Inspired by Lash’s theories of technology and experience, this study argues that Venturi and Scott Brown’s book illustrated ways in which
one experiences the city with various technologies such as the automobile, billboard, neon sign, photography, and street map. In
elaborating the argument, this study defines the term technological phenomenology with the articulation of two strands of experience
known as erfahrung and erlebnis; thereby addressing how these two concepts coexist in today’s information-saturated society. Additionally,
this study takes Learning from Las Vegas as a threshold to investigate the relationship between the diverse forms of technology and
experience to explore how the city is experienced in generative modes of perception and sensibility. Lastly, Neil Leach’s recent studies of
architecture and artificial intelligence (AI) are read against the grain. Leach addresses a flexible notion of technology on one hand, which
is however in part formed based on the dualism between technology and experience. By reading how Leach elaborates theories of
technology with some of his examples, this study can glean from Learning from Las Vegas without heavily relying on either classic
ontology or technological determinism. |