Bin City, Las Vegas

Las Vegas, Nevada, Sin City in the desert: its hotels, casinos, and restaurants generate more than half-a million tons of waste per year, enough to cover an American football field 10 m deep each day. Las Vegas hotels generate more trash than most other tourist destinations Las Vegas sells the ‘‘freedom to waste’‘ as an amenity. Drawing on the notion of waste as social construction and, further, on the legibility of trash patterns as records of human consumption, my project adds a specific site to a special place: Bin City, an ever-growing garbage theme park. Located at the edge of Las Vegas, Bin City acts as a space of entanglement between the urban and the ecological, consumption and recycling, and trash and tourism-a place where technological management, critical knowledge, and playful experience converge; where a culture of leisure and spectacle is confronted with a (non-) culture of mass consumption turning into masses of waste.—Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas1

Text as PDF

Bin City, Las Vegas, Gabu Heindl, in: Journal of Architectural Education, 2005

Awarded
JAE Best Design Article Award 2005/2006