Greetings from Las Vegas: City of Lost Ecologies
This project imagines a possible future for Las Vegas, Nevada by responding to the increasingly dire challenges of climate change in ways simultaneously extrapolative and fantastical, utopian and dystopian. Rooted in self-sustaining technologies and the noble aspiration of revealing newly promising opportunities for the built environment, the project nevertheless remains paradoxically fantastical in its own skepticism.
This project imagines a possible future for Las Vegas, Nevada by responding to the increasingly dire challenges of climate change in ways simultaneously extrapolative and fantastical, utopian and dystopian. Rooted in self-sustaining technologies and the noble aspiration of revealing newly promising opportunities for the built environment, the project nevertheless remains paradoxically fantastical in its own skepticism. To this extent, and in terms of questions related to the figurative ground of architecture, the proposal not only draws upon science fiction as an extra-architectural influence in re-imagining Las Vegas but Derrida’s theory of hauntology as well. As such, the project preserves the city’s current culture of escapism while radically re-imagining it for a not-too-distant future.
