From its bright lights and loud music to its supersized buildings, there’s nothing quite like the Strip in Las Vegas. What was just a century ago a ghost town now draws tens of millions of tourists each year.

It was 2005 when Stefan Al, now an associate professor of urban design at Penn, first visited the energetic city. But he remembers it as if it were yesterday.

“You’re in the desert, driving for a few hours and there’s nothing, then suddenly you have this city where everything is larger than life,” he says. “It’s a stimulation overload. It was very interesting to me. I never experienced something like that.”

The visit spurred for Al what would become 12 years of in-depth research, related papers, a dissertation, and now one of his latest books, “The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream.”

Published by MIT Press earlier this year, Al’s book not only describes the Strip’s history of architectural experimentation throughout its young life, but also how its trends have taken cues reflective of the nation.

Since its beginning, which was built on mafia money in the 1940s, Las Vegas developers “have surfed waves of social, cultural, and economic change to build casinos so compelling that they actually drew vacationers to the Mojave Desert,” writes Al in his introduction. “From exploiting Disneyland to the atom bomb to the sexual revolution to ‘green’ building, the Strip mirrored America as a whole.”

Drawing from archival material housed in sites such as the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; the Las Vegas News Bureau; as well as Penn’s own Architectural Archives, Al brings alive amusing characters, including iconic mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, billionaire Howard Hughes, and business magnate Sheldon Adelson, taking readers creatively and chronologically through the Strip’s Wild West, Sunbelt Modern, Pop City, Corporate Modern, Disneyland, Sim City, and Starchitecture phases. A slew of images throughout the book enlighten every metamorphosis.

“Las Vegas early on invested a lot of money in marketing itself,” explains Al. “It actually has the highest per capita of marketing spent, because they’ve always needed to get the word out and attract people. …Every time a new building was built, the architecture was the heart of the publicity. They’d brag about all the new features.”

The six-acre outdoor Neon Museum was another important resource for Al, who actually served as the Museum’s scholar-in-residence last year.

“They have all the neon signs saved from the 1950s and ’60s—it’s where the neon signs go to die,” he says. “It’s really an amazing place. The letters alone of some of the signs, like the old Stardust sign, are two-stories tall.”

The gargantuan neon signs came of age during the Pop City stage—one of Al’s personal favorites.

“During this time, Las Vegas really became its own eccentric self,” he says. “It gets really bizarre. That’s when developer Jay Sarno builds Caesars Palace, but also Circus Circus.”

The 90-foot-high Circus Circus had a tent-shaped top, painted white and raspberry red. Trapeze artists would perform above gamblers, and monkeys and elephants wandered throughout the casino.

Al found that Sarno said: “You can play a slot machine with our Money Monkey, who jumps for joy if you win or holds his head in sorrow if you lose. There’s another monkey who runs a store. If you want something, give him the money and he’ll bring you the product. ... Here’s a fellow leading two little pink elephants, you can ride them or pet them.”

Although the ’60s were certainly a stepping point for Las Vegas, one could argue Las Vegas is still creating its own identity today, Al says.

“For instance, if you look at the world’s highest grossing night clubs, eight of them are in Las Vegas,” he says. “And they make about $200 million a year, which is about the size of a medium tech company. It’s because they pioneer these new experiences. The trend now is to integrate night clubs with pools so they can have revenue during the night and also during the day.”

Al’s book is chock-full of lessons for a variety of people, including architects or city planners making efforts to think outside the box, especially today, when it comes to “smart” technology, and even marketers learning to perfect the art of branding.

“Vegas really knew how to exploit marketing situations,” Al says. “Like in the ’60s when they started nuclear detonations in the desert, the Strip started organizing atomic bomb cocktail parties. And even today the slogan: ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” that was engineered. It was a marketing invention, and now people believe it.”

Al also purposefully critiques Las Vegas throughout his book. A lot of what has been done in Vegas over the years is emblematic of a risk-taking society, he explains.

“Las Vegas casinos have overleveraged themselves, taking on too big of loans and trying to do risky real estate bets,” he says. “And the way it in the past dealt with water, for example, building in the middle of the desert. It’s not just a book that narrates Las Vegas, it’s also a critique of the current state of our planet and our cities.”