CityCenter Land, LLC
The new CityCenter complex.
Las Vegas

CityCenter Las Vegas, which officially opened last week, is the largest (18 milion square feet of buildings on 67 acres of land) and most expensive ($8.5 billion) private development in the city, probably the country. It is actually a close-packed complex of buildings, each designed by a different, well-known architectural firm. It includes two hotels—the Aria (4004 rooms on 61 floors, the only building here with a casino) and the Harmon (400 rooms, not yet opened); two combined hotel/condominium towers—the Vdara (the name means nothing: 1495 minisuites and suites on 57 stories, which can be used either as hotel rooms or residences) and the Mandarin Oriental (393 hotel rooms below the 23rd floor lobby, 292 residences above); and the Veer Towers, a matched pair of 335-condominium buildings that lean athwart one another like crossed swords. Rambling about the base of the Aria and the Harmon is what must be the most spacious (500,000 square feet) upscale ($1200 shoes) shopping mall in the world, a sun-filled, wildly angled, three-level haven for rich shoppers and poor gawkers called Crystals. It's the most successful building designed by Daniel Libeskind I have seen. David Rockwell did the suave, open interior.


Vegas's New $8.5 Billion CityCenter
CityCenter Las Vegas, which opened last week, is a huge complex of hotels, condos, luxury shopping, dining and entertainment on 67 acres of land.


CityCenter Land, LLC

The other architects or firms involved were Norman Foster (Harmon), Cesar Pelli (Aria), Rafael Viñoly (Vdara), Helmut Jahn (Veer Towers), Kohn Pedersen Fox (Mandarin) and Gensler (master planning and infrastructure.) The lay of the land, the identity of each building and the best way to get from one to the other can take a while to figure out. The Harmon (to the north) and Mandarin Oriental (to the south) have entrances on the Strip, as do the Louis Vuitton and Tiffany & Co. stores in Crystals. Between them are pedestrian escalators and walkways on either side of a complex car, cab, limo and van entrance that splits up like a freeway interchange, destroying some of the promised park-like tranquillity. Passing the leaning towers of Veer, the long entry road and paths end at a traffic circle in front of the high, curving glass facade of Aria. The jazzy entrance to Crystals is on your right. The Vdara actually stands behind the Aria (whose curved facade it matches), with its own entrance and traffic circle off Harmon Avenue.



Mr. Pelli's and Mr. Viñoly's facing crescent-like facades have been sited and carved with considerable tact. The fenestration of each (floor-to-ceiling glass, with projecting horizontal bands between floors) sets a pattern for the whole complex. The exceptions are Mr. Libeskind's hip-hopping, acute-angled steel and glass shell for Crystals, and Mr. Jahn's drunken-looking pair of condo towers, each five degrees off true, which mix two-story opaque yellow panels with glass in a checkerboard fashion. These add a distinct kick to an almost too tasteful, carefuly coordinated ensemble.



My own favorite building, inside and out, is KPF's Mandarin Oriental: a crisp, calm, rectilinear building that emphasize sits vertical lines and appears to disdain the neighboring encampment of curves and off-angles. Discreet cutouts above signal the glass-walled sky lounge and Pierre Gagnaire's restaurant. Everything about it breathes class.



There are far too many public rooms here to write about interiors, except to say that for Las Vegas they are remarkably restrained. Aria's vast casino looks like other big casinos I have seen. The 1,840-seat theater in the Aria is purple walled with decorative holes. But its current raison d'être, the music and life story of Elvis Presley, struck me as a theme unworthy of the style of CityCenter, let alone the unique talents of Cirque du Soleil. There are too many restaurants for me to pretend to be a food critic at this stage, but the one I most enjoyed was Silk Road in the Vdara, where the inventive menu and gracious service almost measured up to the curving gold walls cut open in unexpected places. My favorite bar was also gold—the Gold Lounge adjacent to the Elvis Theater.



In its publicity, CityCenter underlines two of its contributions to civilization. The first is its collection of works of public art by well-known artists such as Henry Moore, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg. Three very large and important commissions went first, to Maya Lin, for a meandering, 84-foot-long silver model of the Colorado River suspended in space; second, to Nancy Rubins, for a 51-foot-high tree made up of dozens of brightly painted metal boats held together by wires; and third, to Jenny Holzer for a 268-foot-long LED panel scrolling her pensées. The Mandarin Oriental shelters immense, compelling contemporary Japanese forms made of stone and ceramic. All the modern art on display is orchestrated with fountains, pools, furniture and interior design with a finesse of contemporary taste that makes the public spaces of most of its rivals—even elegant Bellagio next door—look either old-fashioned or overglitzy.



The second highly-touted good work of CityCenter is its achievement of "LEED Gold" status for six of its buildings, a high mark of distinction for environmental responsibility never before achieved in a project of this scale. (Of course, there are no other projects of this scale.) The center has its own power regeneration plant, energy-saving glass walls, and automatic means of limiting the use of electricity and water. Smoke is pulled upward from the casino floor (all hotels except the Aria are nonsmoking), and slot machine bases house air conditioners. The Aria's fleet of stretch limos to ferry high rollers runs on compressed natural gas.



Does it all work? Will CityCenter save Las Vegas? After an agonizing five years of problems and setbacks, Jim Murren, CEO of MGM Mirage (with Dubai World, the co-owner) and the original dreamer of this extravagant dream, must certainly hope so. It is not a "community," as Mr. Murren pretends—where will his condo dwellers go to buy groceries? It is not a "city," any more than the New York New York just to the south. It is definitely not a city center. Stretching for many miles into the desert, Las Vegas has no center but the Strip, which many of its residents try to ignore. It will never, can never be a "gathering place" for Las Vegans, since more and more of them live in gated neighborhoods in the suburbs.



What it is is a handsome, varied, occasionally ingenious, occasionally even beautiful piece of very expensive, very dense urban planning for 67 acres of short- and long-term housing, luxury shopping, eating and drinking, gambling and other entertainment in a conurbation unique in the world. Presuming it survives, perhaps even helps to turn around that place's's near-disastrous recent decline in visitors and revenues, its greatest contribution may be what it has to teach visitors and other observers about the value of fine art, decoration and architecture, careful planning, and sustainable design.



—Mr. Littlejohn writes for the Journal about West Coast events. He is the editor of "The Real Las Vegas: Life Beyond the Strip" (Oxford, 1999).