13 New Design and Architecture Books to Gift This Year

Fifty-two years after the canonical Learning From Las Vegas pushed the city’s dazzling main strip into the classrooms of architecture students, Rome — Las Vegas: Bread and Circuses presents the two cities through the eyes of Dutch architectural photographer Iwan Baan. There are no captions to tell you where you are, and the overall effect is a flattening of the globe that blurs the line between both cities as sites of ruin and mass consumption. Baan’s images are filled with humor and poetry that reward repeat viewing: Behind a street sign for “Paradise Road,” the Sphere is lit in a paradisial vision of purplish clouds; a man waiting in front of Michelangelo’s David sucks a cigar like a modern-day Goliath; and the stone shoulders of gods at the Trevi Fountain are, in his frame, less interesting than the bare skin of the tourists sweating out front. — Adriane Quinlan

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