With the opening of CityCenter, serious architecture and design—and a bit of real urban texture—have arrived amid the neon-lit razzle-dazzle of the Las Vegas Strip.
Sunrise on the Las Vegas Strip: as cleaning crews scrub the traces of the nightly moving party from the sidewalks and the last revelers stare in wonderment at fresh-faced joggers, most of the Strip’s casinos and hotels are revealed to be a bit less phantasmagorical and a bit more beige than they appeared the night before. But not CityCenter. The humongous $8.5 billion, 18-million-square-foot development that opened in December is the rare sort of Vegas spectacle that actually looks great—maybe even better—in the morning light. The jagged steel-and-glass peaks of architect Daniel Libeskind’s luxury shopping mall, Crystals, glisten in the sunshine. The multihued blue-glass panels of the Norman Foster–designed Harmon Hotel (planned at 49 stories, but only built to 28 because of structural problems) pop in the morning light, as do the splashes of mustard yellow on the rakishly angled Veer condo towers by Chicago-based architect Helmut Jahn. The sunlight plays off the glass exteriors of each of the major hotels—the 4,000-room Aria Resort & Casino, the 1,495-room Vdara Hotel & Spa, and the 392-room Mandarin Oriental—in a different way. The product of five years of feverish design and construction by casino developer and operator MGM Mirage (in partnership with a subsidiary of Dubai World) and a dramatic rescue last April from near bankruptcy, CityCenter is a study in nuance—a novelty in a town that does not trade in subtlety. It is also a bold statement of grown-up style and real architecture in a town not known for either.
