The commercial strip , the Las Vegas Strip in particular – the example par excellence ( Figs. 1 and 2 ) – challenges the architect to take a positive, non-chip-on-the-shoulder view. Architects are out of the habit of looking nonjudgmentally at the environment, because orthodox Modern architecture is progressive, if not revolutionary utopian, and puristic; it is dissatisfied with existing condition. Modern architecture has been anything but permissive: Architects have preferred to change the existing environment rather than enhance what is there.