In Business Las Vegas, November 2nd, 2007
Las Vegas
casinos are morphing from efficient but uninteresting boxes to more visually pleasing and compelling structures designed to provide the city with its own identity, panelists at an Urban Land Institute session concluded.
In a panel featuring "star-chitects" — award-winning building designers who are bringing their work to the Las Vegas Strip — participants concluded that the new
Vegas
skyline coming in the next three to four years will be considerably different from today's resorts because the designers are going out of their way to develop structures that will bring people together.
Some of them are using classic ideas from centuries ago that foster community instead of mimicking something from somewhere else.
"I think
Las Vegas
ran out of themes – it ran out of other places to duplicate," said
Bernardo
Fort-Brescia, principal
of
Miami
-based Arquitectonica, which is working on the Cosmopolitan project at Las Vegas Boulevard and Harmon Avenue.
"The buildings are starting to evolve with more interest in experienced architecture,"
Fort-Brescia
said. "The city also evolving. It wants to have its own identity, not somewhere else."
The themed resort has been a staple of
Las Vegas
success for years. From Circus Circus replicating entertainment under the big top and Caesars Palace presenting visions of ancient
Rome
came tributes to cities (the Venetian and Paris-Las Vegas), literature (Treasure Island) and fantasy (Excalibur).
Steve
Wynn
applied the brakes to themed resorts when he designed Wynn Las Vegas and hid all the inside attractions with a man-made mountain. Now, designers are taking
Las Vegas
to a new level with treatments in glass, lighting, water and public art, panelists said.
Fort-Brescia
said
Las Vegas
' reputation as a free-market city where new ideas are encouraged makes it an exciting prospect for building designers.
Great Britain
-based
Ray
Hole, managing director
of Ray Hole Architects, is working on a project called the Lava Lamp Building for the Strip, said many buildings are being designed for visitors "who have all the time in the world and like to go out at night."
The 450-foot mixed-use structure would accommodate restaurants, bars, a pod hotel, exhibition and museum space and also would support a multi-capsule viewing tower.
"By day, it's sculpturally striking, reflecting the intense sunlight off stainless steel fabric cladding, by night, transforming into a transparent shell revealing both occupants and super-sized morphing forms that rise and fall," the project is described on his Web site.
J.F.
Finn III, principal
, for Gensler,
Las Vegas
, the executive architect for MGM Mirage's CityCenter project, and his
associate, David
Mexico
, said the development's designers studied important gathering places worldwide, from
New York
's Central Park and
Barcelona
's Las Ramblas to the Spanish Steps of Rome to develop ideas to incorporate into CityCenter's public areas.
"What we learned in
Las Vegas
is that it's all about bringing people together,"
Mexico
said. "It's all about the social aspect and that's what's going to be exciting about this place."
