Peter Eisenman started his speech by quoting Rem Koolhaas' statement on Venturi and Scott Brown's study of Las Vegas. Koolhaas said that Learning from Las Vegas initiated the second wave of studies on capitalism and architecture, following Mies van der Rohe.xix Eisenman added, "Their (Venturi and Scott Brown's) books go beyond that - they remain as a historic short-cut between mannerism and the contemporary city." According to Eisenman, any (effective) communication must have both grammar and rhetoric, and in Venturi and Scott Brown’s oeuvre, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture established the former and Learning from Las Vegas provided the latter. Their latest collaborative book, Architecture as Signs and Systems for a Mannerist Time , could be understood as a communication to the younger generation of architects that utilizes both the grammar and the rhetoric that they have developed. Eisenman stated that Venturi and Scott Brown initiated a radical change in architectural discourse, opening a whole new world of thinking, and ended his speech with a “big thank-you.” (Figure 13)