From Las Vegas to Rome: Photographs by Iwan – Mextrópoli

The Mextrópoli Festival is one of Latin America’s most important architecture and city festivals. The 2025 edition will focus on “collective housing” in the face of a global housing crisis. The UIA World Congress of Architects 2026 Barcelona will be presented in Mexico City on 20 September 2025, at the Centro Cultural España, within the framework of Mextrópoli Festival.

In 2022, 50 years after Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and Steven Izenour declared in their influential book Learning from Las Vegas that the desert town was to the Strip what Rome is to the Piazza, the American Academy of Rome debuted the exhibition From Las Vegas to Rome, exploring dialogues between these two cities through images taken by Dutch photographer Iwan Baan. The exhibition contrasts Rome and Las Vegas to explore themes of authenticity versus artifice, power, and spectacle through photography and a comparison of their historical and commercial identities.

Date: September 18–21, 2025.