What is the opposite of an “architectural lap dance?” That was the question we tried to answer during a recent conversation at the University of Nevada Las Vegas School of Architecture. IIT College of Architecture dean Reed Kroloff, who used the louche allusion to describe the familiar forms of the city’s Strip; local architect Eric Strain, FAIA, who has been trying to figure out what you do beyond that stretch of high-rises and signs for four decades; and I were trying to define what might be the characteristics of architecture native to what is now an urban conglomeration of more than three million people.
Although we came up with few answers, Kroloff and I agreed a good place to start might be the work of Strain himself. Raised in the city, Strain returned there after his education at the University of Utah more than three decades ago. He worked for several local architects (including what is now TSK, another firm trying to make good local Las Vegas architecture), before starting his own practice, assemblageStudio. While also teaching (although he was, in one of those bizarre twists of academic politics that make my head spin, recently denied tenure by UNLV) and organizing everything from charettes for homeless shelters to campaigns to bring an art museum to the area, he has built up a portfolio that ranges from private homes to public high schools.
As most architects do, Strain developed his palette or bag of tricks in his designs of single family homes. He likes to break apart his volumes as much as possible, as in the House in Two Parts. In that manner, they turn into abstractions not only of the boulders strewn around the local desert, but also of the parade of human-made detritus that forms most of the residential and commercial vernacular around his buildings. He then covers many of the buildings with scrims and screens, expressively so in his tresArca House. These provide sheltered and shaded outdoor space as an alternative both to the harshness of the local conditions and the cocoons of air conditioning with which we have filled that desert.
Within these forms, Strain turns his designs into compositions of simple blocks and screens. Those jut out to provide definition and more shade, slide by each other to further break up volumes, and cohere into spaces that, from the inside, open back up to the vastness of the landscape. In his commercial work, though he is more constrained in what he can do, Strain punches forms in and out of surfaces, as in the small dentist’s office he designed in Henderson. There, what is a two-story box turns into a play of metal, stucco, and concrete block screens that offers a sculptural answer to the total absence of any kind of character or specificity in its surroundings.
Strain’s largest project, and for me the most successful, is his recently completed new joint campus for two magnet schools in Las Vegas, the Global Community High School and the Central Technical Training Academy. Like TSK, which has designed quite a few of these behemoth collections of what are, by local regulations and client requests, concrete-block boxes with few windows, Strain has wrested a great deal of beauty and good place-making out of unforgiving conditions including budget and code constraints.
Sited a few blocks west of the Strip in a mixed commercial and residential neighborhood, the schools serve students who speak 62 different languages and are themselves a sign of the emergence of a metropolis whose diversity and social tension is akin to those found in the other booming cities of the Southwest. Within that context, the campus is burdened by the fact that we as a society increasingly refuse to invest anything more than the bare minimum in shared facilities necessary to our survival as such a diverse community, be they schools or basic infrastructure. There was, in other words, no money.
What Strain did, following TSK’s lead, was to figure out where the design opportunities were. First, you can do wonders with a lick of paint. Ranging from deep orange to electric green and vivid yellow, the colors with which the architect covered the various parts of the institutions not only help break down the scale of schools that together will eventually serve 1,200 students, but also make the buildings instantly stand out among their neighbors.
Then there is the arrangement of the buildings themselves, which help to create a landscape sheltered from the street. Although xeriscaped, part of the open area is meant to be used as a teaching device by the training academy for urban agriculture. The planting is minimal and drought-resistant, and yet the territory offers another alternative to the asphalt and parking lots beyond its confines. Strain also was able to break down the monolithic volumes at entrances and where there are support services such as offices, turning them toward each other and the students.
Finally, Strain convinced the Las Vegas County Schools Commission that he could save them a great deal of money by eliminating interior corridors. He did this by turning all of the classrooms toward that captured bit of desert, opening them up so that the outdoor space could both provide access to and continue the work happening in the classrooms. To make that possible, he needed to erect shade and access structures, for which he used half of the savings he had found.
It is these metal constructions—with their large, but light roofs, walkways, staircases, elevators, and the angled supports that make them possible—that are the campus’s most expressive parts. They are also where the students gather and the real learning takes place.
I do not mean to imply that the schools have the easy grace and beauty of an East Coast prep school, or even the grandeur and civic aura of the high schools we built all over the country before public education sank to the bottom of our spending priorities. But, what Strain has been able to do with almost no money—$400 a square foot—and severe code and regulation restrictions is remarkable.
It also points the way toward how Las Vegas might free itself of both the architectural lap dances it does on the Strip and the lumpen, motionless, and arid environments in which millions of people now live and work beyond it. Breaking down volumes, working with the simplest materials, and figuring out how to use them in expressive ways is where it starts. Then, architects must recognize that, if this and other Southwest cities are going to survive and thrive, they need community spaces that are sheltered and shaded, but also open and shared to serve and help shape a diverse community. This recognition will be the key to a future Las Vegas architecture. As part of that effort, Eric Strain is making major contributions to the emergence of what I hope will be a vibrant local vernacular.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.
Read more: The latest from columnist Aaron Betsky includes looks at an exhibition on architectural image-making, a proposal for reimagining Penn Station in New York, and the first Storyliving by Disney community.