Learning from Leadville; or Re-contextualizing Venturi, Scott-Brown, & Izenour

Between 1870-1890, Leadville, Colorado transformed from a small mining town to a bustling metropolitan city of round-the-clock activity that could rival modern-day Las Vegas.

This project attempts to re-contextualize Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown, and Steven Izenour’s “Learning from Las Vegas” to speculate on a future for Leadville that concludes in a world-class entertainment destination.

By examining Leadville’s architectural false fronts and ornamentation, we constructed a reading of the city that lingers between looseness and specificity, networks and grids, and the familiar and unfamiliar. Our proposal offers a new type of monument for Leadville’s infill blocks: a decorated duck that that challenges the lessons of Las Vegas’s architecture of communication and Lynch’s definition of elements of the city.