Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Muriel Cooper

A first edition of Learning from Las Vegas.

• Robert Venturi (American).
• Denise Scott Brown (American).
• Steven Izenour (American).
• Muriel Cooper (American).
• Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1972.
• Large quarto.
• Color and black and white photographs, diagrams, plans and maps.
• Plain endpapers, dark grey cloth-covered boards, titles stamped in gold on sides and spine, color photographic reproduction mounted on upper side, publisher's printed glassine dust-jacket, housed in a custom black cloth drop spine box.

This early manifesto of postmodernism was designed by Muriel Cooper (1925-1994), a pioneering graphic designer and one of the first designers to see the potential of computers as tools for inventing new ways to organize visual information. She was the first design director of the MIT Press, cofounder of the Visible Language Workshop at MIT, and the first woman to be granted tenure at MIT's Media Lab, where she taught a new generation of designers. Her work spans print to software interfaces.

Learning from Las Vegas is compiled from research materials gathered in 1968 by students of a third-year graduate class at Yale School of Architecture, taught by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. The class Learning from Las Vegas, or Form Analysis as Design Research, required the students to make a non-judgemental study of the city and how it functioned, and their research was documented through photographs, films, maps, and diagrams. Muriel Cooper was tasked with translating the diverse materials from the studio into a book, initially planning for the book to be protected by a bubble wrap dust-jacket, with fluorescent dots on the boards.

'The visual materials were not only graphically rich but as content-laden as the text, so the interdependent rhythms of those relationships were important. I wanted to arrange visual and verbal materials spatially in a nonlinear way to enhance the reader's comprehension.'

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown were unimpressed and enacted a complete, much more traditional redesign for the 1977 paperback second edition, dismissing Cooper's work in their preface. Cooper's reputation and legacy have grown and grown since.