Can you bring architectural virtue to Las Vegas?

[M II A II R II K]

What Happens in Vegas


October 4, 2010

By Paul Goldberger

Read More: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critic...ine_goldberger

In 1965, a hotel owner named Jay Sarno began construction on a new hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, and decided to set his creation apart from the competition by modelling it on a Roman palace. Caesars Palace was really no different from any other big hotel, but the Roman arches and columns stuck on its façade, not to mention the tunic-clad cocktail waitresses inside, were such a hit that the place spawned a generation of imitations, each aiming to outdo the last in eye-popping extravagance. Las Vegas became the world’s largest theme park, with hotels intended to make you feel that you are in Venice, or Paris, or Egypt, or New York, or Bellagio, or on a pirate’s island, or among King Arthur and his knights.

- But it’s been clear for a while that Las Vegas has been running out of themes. The trouble is that its effects rely entirely on dazzlement, an over-the-top gigantism that gets old fast. By this point, you could do a hotel that reproduced Angkor Wat or the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan and no one would raise an eyebrow. And as Las Vegas has grown—until the recession, its expansion had helped make Nevada the fastest-growing state in the nation—the city has started to feel a little uncomfortable about its reputation as a place where developers spend billions of dollars on funny buildings

- For several years now, there has been talk about whether Las Vegas could handle what in any other city might be referred to as real architecture. And in 2004, when the hotel company MGM Mirage (now known as MGM Resorts International) was looking for a way of filling in a sixty-six-acre site between two of its properties on the west side of the Strip (the Bellagio and the Monte Carlo), it hit on the idea of turning the plot into a showcase for modern architecture.

- The complex is called CityCenter, and it is the biggest construction project in the history of Las Vegas. It has three hotels, two condominium towers, a shopping mall, a convention center, a couple of dozen restaurants, a private monorail, and a casino. There was to have been a fourth hotel, whose opening has been delayed indefinitely. But even without it the project contains nearly eighteen million square feet of space, the equivalent of roughly six Empire State Buildings. “We wanted to create an urban space that would expand our center of gravity,” Jim Murren, the chairman of the company, told me.

- “The idea I wanted to convey was to bring smarter planning to the development process in Las Vegas, to expand our boundaries of knowledge,” Murren told me. “Las Vegas is always looked down upon. CityCenter is a counterpoint to the kitschiness.

- The developers are counting on these modern buildings to have the same visceral impact that visitors to Las Vegas are used to getting from make-believe historical architecture, or from Trump-style glitz. They don’t. But that, in a way, is a saving grace, because, whether or not CityCenter manages to lure people away from theme-park hotels, you can, at least, imagine seeing it every day without getting sick of it. Still, the underlying risk of the CityCenter project is that good buildings next to outlandish ones will look quiet and bland. Caesars Palace and its progeny are crass but iconic. The CityCenter buildings are sophisticated, but you wonder, finally, if they are all that memorable.

- Even though there is more density to CityCenter than there is to anything else in Las Vegas, and more sophistication to its architecture, it doesn’t feel urban. Its planners have crammed more square footage into a tighter space than anyone else has managed in Las Vegas, and that may make this place seem like an antidote to sprawl. But it still isn’t much of a center, or much of a city. Indeed, as you drive around the site, you suddenly wonder if CityCenter only appears to be different from the rest of the Strip. After all, cutting-edge contemporary architecture by the likes of Libeskind and Foster has been migrating steadily into the cultural mainstream for years. Now, perhaps, it has reached the point where it is familiar enough, and likable enough, to be just another style available for imitation, like the Pyramids or Renaissance Venice. CityCenter is the Las Vegas you already know, but in modernist drag.

The CityCenter development, on the Las Vegas Strip, attempts to provide an alternative to the city’s garish architectural pastiches. Photograph by Robert Polidori.

[SkyscrapersOfNewYork]

its already there....

[Krases]

Bellagio isn't as heavily themed as many other resorts. I think that was the key to its success. Vegas would be in a real architectural Renaissance right now if it wasn't for the economic double punch the city received (tourism and housing).

City Center isn't a good example of urbanism though. Its actually kinda scary to walk on foot outside the buildings because of all the traffic. This policy of crummy foot access and car-centrism comes from the old concept of the casino as an Island with people preferably not leaving the building.

Hopefully if Harrahs ever makes anything of their own holdings across from Caesars and transforms it into a block-sized mega casino, it will take urbanism into greater account. But like I said, economy.

[volguus zildrohar]

I remember being charmed by what CityCenter was trying to accomplish. Techincally, it's a marvelous project - very eye-catching. There were few other resorts on The Strip that I found as visually pleasing.

The problem, of course, is that it's essentially a superblock and as such adds little to the fundamentally sparse streetscape of The Strip - at least speaking in typical urban terms though I don't think it's reasonable or fair to try to knock Vegas (or actually Paradise, NV) for being what it is. It's chintzy foofery and has never claimed to be anything more than an illusion and that's fine with me. It's a city sized entertainment district.

[M II A II R II K]

The Evil of Banality


By Aaron Betsky



Read More: http://www.architectmagazine.com/blo...g&postId=97587

America can’t even do tacky right anymore. That became evident to me last week when I spent a few hours in Atlantic City, but it only confirmed to me what I think has been evident for at least a decade: the sanitization and appropriation of what used to be the exuberance of the underclass has proven unstoppable. Times Square is the most obvious example, with its sex workers and neon signs for cheap eats and sleazy shows replaced by stock tickers and Disney extravaganzas.

In Las Vegas, I have over the last two decades watched not only the disappearance of the gimcrackery old hotels and their immense bursts of colored lights that hid their basic banality, but even the replacement of the original sign for Treasure Island, which at least was a sculpture that made reference to outlaw culture, with a generic animated reader board. The Strip has given way to City Center, a facsimile of an upscale Edge City. Route 66 has sprawled into endless chain restaurants, big box retail and endless acres of beige.

In Atlantic City, the Steel Pier is now a multilevel shopping mall with the same stores you find in all the shopping malls on the other side of the Pine Barrens. The hawkers are licensed. The Boardwalk is immaculate and patrolled by cops on electric scooters. Instead of salt-water taffy you buy Starbucks coffee. Even the Convention Center, or Boardwalk Hall, a magnificent Art Deco container for boxing matches and pageants, is now an almost unused hockey rink with metal and glass storefronts jammed behind its stone façade.

The boardwalk always had a basic problem: it is one-sided. As any retail expert will tell you, it is very difficult to keep people moving not only in one direction, but also back and forth, when only one side holds their interest, while on the other nothing but sand and the always chilly Atlantic Ocean beckons. It used to be that there were so many stalls and hawkers that the actual buildings were mostly an afterthought. The typical beach scene came from the confusion of temporary and often movable bits and pieces, but also from such spectacles as the human cannonball. Now boardwalks feel empty (granted, I was there on a sunny afternoon after Labor Day), but, more than that, the monotony of the large hotels that dominate the promenade’s central area deaden any sense of life. The Bally and its kin are so atrocious, so badly scaled and faced, that just the memory of them makes me shudder.

[M II A II R II K]

Hot Architecture: Vegas 'Death Ray' Singes Tourists


http://www.aolnews.com/nation/articl...-deck/19651004

LAS VEGAS (Sept. 28) -- Las Vegas resorts have long vied to be known as the hottest place in town. But that's not such a great distinction for Vdara, a 10-month-old Strip hotel-condo where a "death ray" of strong Nevada sunlight reflects off the concave, all-glass facade and onto sections of the pool deck throughout the day.

- Chicago attorney Bill Pintas felt its power firsthand after returning to his lounge chair after a swim last week. "It felt like I had a chemical burn. I couldn't imagine why my head was burning," said Pintas, who owns a condo in the 57-story building. "Within 30 seconds, the back of my legs and back were burning. My first thought was, 'Jesus, they destroyed the ozone layer!'"

- Despite what Vdara's bartenders, pool attendants and visitors mockingly call it, the problem is technically known as "solar convergence." The sun's heat is amplified as it reflects off the curved building, creating areas of increased heat that, during a midday Monday visit by AOL News, made the metal parts of some chairs dangerous to touch.

When the Nevada sun hits the concave, all-glass facade of the new Vdara hotel in Las Vegas, it creates a beam of concentrated solar energy that can melt plastic and singe hair.






CityCenter CEO Bobby Baldwin, right, and other MGM Mirage officials stand in the area where the Vdara "death ray" beamed onto the pool deck about noon Monday.