The two major projects that gave Stone renown in his home country were the United States Pavilion at the Exposition Universelle et Internationale in Bruxelles (1958), and the American Embassy in New Delhi (1959). It is here that his experiments with punctured blocks were first given a comprehensive public airing. The motif of the quarter-divided circle in his grillwork became Stone’s signature. It appeared in many of his buildings, unchanged, and much later in a large quantity of suburban front walls in Britain – it is a pattern we should all recognise. Some of his facades, such as student accommodation at the University of South Carolina (1965) and his own house in Manhattan (1958) are almost completely clad in this same patterned block. Hunting cites this as one of the reasons for Stone’s critical demise: his attempt to create a recognizable architectural brand came with the dire risk of self-pastiche.

At his best Stone designed with the same spirit as Louis Kahn, taking the principles of modernism and blending with historical reference to create buildings with popular appeal. Where Kahn played with form and materiality, Stone was obsessed with layering and layout. He dubbed his approach “new romanticism”, and believed that the design of buildings should “be in the accumulation of history”. No wonder he was never entirely accepted by the dour modernist critics of that era, and for this reason Hunting is quick to position Stone as a precursor to post-modernism. Venturi is name-checked regularly in her argument, though Stone was not about complexity and contradiction – he embraced many of the principles of modernism, his plans were rational and fully formed. His work was an attempt to make modernism prettier, to bring back the decorative element. If anything Stone’s buildings remind us that post-modernity did not begin with the burning of a chair or a visit to Las Vegas, but an accumulation of dissatisfaction with an aesthetic. Stone partly understood this and used his career to help buck a trend.

East Tropicana is a tributary of the Strip. It is a functional supply route, an eight-lane thoroughfare that provides a conduit for cheap labour from the suburbs. I arrive at University Plaza, a large parking lot surrounded by drab post-colonial style one-storey commercial units, tan rendered, and scan the perimeter for the object of my destination; the only coin-operated laundrette within a mile of the Strip, and one of the few places where I can wash my clothes before I make the long drive to Los Angeles. I enter and take an unadulterated pause to breathe in the moist processed air, a welcome respite from the arid heat of the street. I investigate the methodology, and make my own arrangements with a washing machine. Luckily, I am not short of quarters, a week on the road has provided well in that department, and soon my own sun-worn clothes are darkening in a pool of warm water, giving up their form to the liquid and rotation of the drum. Las Vegas was built around a desert spring, but the oasis ran dry years ago and the water that feeds the half-million residents of the city is now sourced thirty miles away from Lake Mead, a reservoir of the Colorado River created by the Hoover Dam. This water has taken a path into my own body through the ice in the whisky sodas that I drank last night, and into the sprinkler systems that feed the trees lining the boulevards of modest bungalows that surround the plaza, and now into the fabric of my clothes. Current predictions suppose that the lake might run dry within the next ten years, so a new source will have to be found.

A boy, aged about ten, is sitting on a chair opposite to me. He is rocking his head back and forth and his pupils are lodged at the top of his eyelids. He sees nothing but hears everything; the whirring and sloshing of the machines, the clunk of the coin-machines, the change of air pressure as the door swings open and closed, and the soft chatter of the clientele. I make up my mind that he is a fixture here, that this laundrette provides his sensory world and his daily routine. He cannot be moved by the flashing lights or the post-modern architecture of the Strip, but for him, this small interior space is Las Vegas. The young woman in cut-off jeans, whose teenage son is helping to fold her evening work clothes into a carefully separated pile has a different understanding of the city, as does the middle-aged man whose branded coloured shirts now hang neatly from a mobile rack.

But the blind boy is smiling, he is content here. We are behind the scenes at Las Vegas, and for the first time I feel relaxed in this city.

Richard Green, the established purveyor of 20^th Century art to individuals with a good head for investment and the assets to afford good taste, has opened a new outlet at number 33 next to Sothebys. He has chosen to dress his stall with the neoclassical trappings of the Adams architectural encampment. An Helenic bas-relief adorns the bronze framed stone facade, a scene from the Odyssey representing the birth of modern art, a bold reinterpretation of the avant-garde as renaissance. Perhaps this context was a pill too bitter to swallow on its own.

Inside, celebrated naive scenes of working class industrial gatherings are given pride of place alongside the revolutionary introspection of the abstract expressionists. “How much does an Auerbach go for these days?” was the question that I overheard. An assistant rummaged around the back of the work, presumably looking for a barcode but revealing a simple price tag, “this one’s is one million, one hundred”. “Fascinating” was the reply, and indeed it was.