Category: Architecture

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Notes from Vegas: White Stripes

Last night, I took my car out to the In-N-Out Burger on Tropicana Blvd. Rather than return via I-15, I decided to drive down the strip, starting around Circus Circus and the MGM Grand. My hotel is at the far end of the strip, near the Space Needle building, the Stratosphere, and my conference is nowhere near the strip, so this was likely the only opportunity I’d get to drive through and try to pick up some impressions. I’m still working on processing it all, but I’m having a tough time of it.

I arrived in Vegas on a Saturday evening once, and the cab ride to my hotel was impossible due to strip-traffic. This time, there wasn’t much volume. I chalk it up to Monday night slowdown, rather than fiscalpocalypse.

The funny thing about having a car on this trip is that I never drove in Vegas before, so I never noticed that the streets don’t have stripes painted to demarcate the lanes. They have little raised reflectors, but no white lines. (This made my drive in from the airport — in which I had a blinding headache and the sun was just a few minutes from descending behind the mountains — kinda frightening.)

Anyway, the reason I’m writing is because I passed the City Center project during this trip. It consists of a bunch of sleek towers and a big-ass mall. I saw it around 18 months earlier during this trip. It’s been in the news lately because of financing problems; a fund in Dubai doesn’t want to cover to giant cost overruns in order to finish a luxury hotel/condo/casino/mall complex at a time when no one has money.

After seeing the silly jagged multi-planar design for the front (mall) of the Center, I’m hoping they pulled out after developing taste. Here’s an interview with the architect of this grotesquerie, Daniel Liebeskind, on how to rethink a mall or something.

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Building Perspective

Nicolai Ouroussoff seems to be celebrating restraint in his review of the Standard, a new hotel on 13th St. in NYC:

These are simple but powerful moves. And they are a reminder that enveloping a structure in a flamboyant wrapper is not always the most effective way to create lasting architecture. In the wrong hands, too much creative freedom can be outright dangerous.

With the Standard Hotel, Polshek Partnership joins a handful of other midlevel firms that are beginning to find the right balance between innovation and restraint.

That’s a pleasant change from his past rambles (here’s a good one), so maybe the New Austerity is having an impact on his work.

Meanwhile, this writer for this Reuters article on the MGM CityCenter project in Las Vegas must have had a hard time not chortling when he recorded this passage —

“The events of the last six months have been our Pearl Harbor, economically,” said Bill Thompson, gaming expert and professor of public administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “CityCenter might be too big to fail. If it opens, it’s a dramatic gesture that says we’re winning, we’re not defeated, we’re on the way back.”

“If it fails, it would be like a second Pearl Harbor.”

— about a 67-acre condo/hotel/casino/shopping mall complex. I think it’s very funny that a professor of public administration at UNLV is referred to first as a “gaming expert,” because it implies (to me) that he’s a compulsive gambler.

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What It Is: 2/9/09

What I’m reading: Montaigne, Clive James, and a big photo book on Robert A.M. Stern’s buildings and projects from 1999-2003.

What I’m listening to: The soundtrack to The Darjeeling Limited.

What I’m watching: RuPaul’s Drag Race. And something manly. Oh, and Broken Flowers, in which all the roads Bill Murray is seen driving on are all north Jersey and New York state, generally along my morning commute. My wife recognized Rt. 4 instantly, when Murray drove past the Joyce Leslie store across from Bergen Mall.

What I’m drinking: Plymouth & Q Tonic, as well as some beer that my pal Sang brought over for the Superbowl last week.

What Rufus is up to: Getting drenched during our Sunday greyhound hike, courtesy of weather.com’s failure to give any word beyond “Cloudy a.m. / Sunny p.m.” Still, we got some nice pix! (Amy, of course, took better ones; if she posts ’em, I’ll link.)

Where I’m going: Nowhere special, but I should come up with something good for Valentine’s day (which is also the birthday of my brother and my dog)!

What I’m happy about: That I managed to replace a toilet flapper and supply valve stem without incident!

What I’m sad about: That when a new business contact for my day job proposed we have a lunch meeting to get acquainted last week, I suggested the White Castle on Rt. 59. He accepted and, while we had a great 2+-hour conversation, we couldn’t sit directly across from each other, on account of Slider-breath.

What I’m pondering: When it’ll be okay to listen to Katrina & the Waves again.