The erotics of fieldwork in Learning from Las Vegas

This chapter is focused on uncovering the relationship between scientific fieldwork and repressed sexuality in Learning from Las Vegas. Fieldwork is especially significant in Learning from Las Vegas because that work set out to use scientific methods and techniques to provoke a revolution in architecture. Fieldwork is also central to two similarly important types of revolution that shaped Learning from Las Vegas. The first is Thomas Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions, proposed in the 1960s for understanding how change is promoted in a discipline. The second is the sexual revolution, which became widespread in the 1960s and which drew some of its inspiration from the fieldwork of anthropologist Margaret Mead. The chapter revisits the fieldwork undertaken for Learning from Las Vegas in 1968 and questions both its objectivity and its ambivalent and inconsistent attitude towards gender and sexuality. As a key component of this investigation, the chapter adopts the anthropological notion of the 'erotics of fieldwork' to illuminate these previously ignored dimensions in Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour's work.