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The Neon Museum is hosting a four-day event entitled Duck Duck Shed: Celebrating Las Vegas Architecture, Design, and Culture on October 27-30. The event will include walking tours, aerial tours, sessions with industry experts, and a tour of Jungle Palace, the historic estate of Siegfried & Roy, a private home that has never been granted public access. To sign up for tours and lectures, please visit www.duckduckshed.com.
The Duck Duck Shed idea first identified in a book called “Learning from Las Vegas” by Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and Steven Izenour, which celebrates its 50th year since its initial printing and is still considered required reading in many universities’ architecture programs.
The authors penned the idea that buildings are either “ducks” that explicitly and literally represent their function through their unique shape and design, or “decorated sheds” that are buildings that require a sign to differentiate one from another. Examples of this academic concept over the course of Las Vegas history include the Tropicana which opened in 1957 and Resorts World that opened just last year as “decorated sheds,” and the Excalibur, Luxor and Circus Circus as “ducks.”
Some of Duck Duck Shed’s featured programs include “The View from Flamingo Road: How Las Vegas Mastered Modernism” with Alan Hess; “The Gilded Cage: The Psychology of a Casino’s Architecture” with architects Brian Fink, Jon Sparer, and Mitchell Trageton; “Two Perspectives on Paul Revere Williams” with photographer Janna Ireland and Carmen Beals, associate curator and outreach director of the Nevada Museum of Art; “The Wayward Eye Exhibition – Photography of Denise Scott Brown”; and “The Local Lore of Downtown: A Walking Tour of Iconic Casinos.”
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