Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Grow, sprawl, deny nature

That’s the Las Vegas story told by this photo exhibit

Urbanizing the Mojave

Huber/Stern

Las Vegas’ sprawl is the subject of a new exhibit.

When Ralph Stern and Nicole Huber were writing Urbanizing the Mojave Desert: Las Vegas in 2008, the city was still riding high on growth. New homes, storage lots and construction covered the landscape, alongside billboards for new communities.

Stern and Huber chronicled the expansion after moving here from Berlin. Their project received international attention beginning in 2005, when a London architectural journal published early images from the research. The book's pictures have since been exhibited in Berlin and at Arizona State University's College of Design — and now at the Clark County Museum, through June 30.

Click to enlarge photo

A photo from Urbanizing the Mojave

In the exhibit, the city is shown without its usual glamour — the magical façades, populated hotel pools and nightlife. These photos are documentary, not designed for flattery or artistic merit. Mostly taken without people, they portray a city being simultaneously torn apart and reconstructed: manses on terraced mountains, fleets of trucks ready for battle on the environment, billboards promising themed master-planned communities, manmade waterfalls, boxy stucco homes bereft of community, dirt lots. The themed skyline of the Strip rises from the rocky desert as if Photoshopped in; yachts rest in Lake Mead; a tent is pitched in an empty lot, with a plaid couch nearby and the Luxor behind.

Anyone visiting the exhibit, Urbanizing the Mojave Desert: Las Vegas, will likely ask, "What exactly are we looking at here?" It's a legitimate question, given that there is little wall text or explanation.

Calendar

Urbanizing the Mojave Desert: Las Vegas
through June 30
Clark County Museum

It's perhaps more pertinent, however, to ask that question while driving home from the museum, while looking at semi-empty neighborhoods and our finally still landscape. What, exactly, are we looking at? It's weird here, and the images of Urbanizing depict that, though the book doesn't take a moral stance on the growth. It's designed only to portray the "third sight" of the Valley, the interstitial — those spaces between the glamour of the Strip, the charm of Downtown neighborhoods and the landscape-lovely planned communities in Summerlin and parts of Henderson.

Stern and Huber balance Las Vegas somewhere between a 21st-century Western city and a "simple boomtown," much like other Western cities that have "grown quickly on the basis of extractive industries with multitudes coming to strike it rich without attending to the final social or environmental costs."

Mostly, the book shows what it looks like to urbanize in an extreme and fragile environment, and highlights the little regard we feel toward cultural memory and identity, how we've erased the Mojave Desert (the way the Strip erases old properties) and replaced it with a strong sense of elsewhere — tropical — and Mediterranean-themed neighborhoods, manmade lakes that suggest Europe.

Now we live with what we have, for better or worse. This is our story and it's now part of our history. If that changes, we'll at least have Urbanizing as a reminder.

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