The BIG SIGN – LITTLE BUILDING publication contexts contributions by writers, theorists and artists such as Ed Ruscha, Steven Izenour, Robert Venturi and John Rauch, Jeff Wall, Charlotte Posenenske and Peter Eisenman, amongst others, as well as documentation material from the exhibition. The book departs from and extends beyond a seminal project developed by the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, who, in their book Learning from Las Vegas (1972), drew from existing critiques of urban space at the time to explore the role that signs played in providing order to the landscape. As an articulation of a space contesting the hegemony of Euclidean space, this approach also intrigued artists such as Charlotte Posenenske, Ed Ruscha, Robert Smithson, and Jeff Wall, who further challenged such traditional notions of space in order to explore new interpretations of landscape within the fields of aesthetics, art and architecture without succumbing to any one category. Other artists, such as Claes Oldenburg and Allan D'Arcangelo, cited as inspiration by the three architects, contested the sign system altogether, which increasingly reflected an attempt on the part of capital to claim nature, landscape, and public space as commodities. BIG SIGN – LITTLE BUILDING (Verksted no. 16) is edited by OCA's former director Marta Kuzma.
