Vegas Baby

This was written back in March, about my January trip to Las Vegas. Sadly it lost its slot in the magazine it was written for, and has after some months in limbo found its way to the spike. So here it is. Photos are from my Flickr stream.

“We rode around from casino to casino, dazed by the desert sun and dazzled by the signs, both loving and hating what we saw, we were jolted clear out of our aesthetic skins,” said the architect Denise Scott Brown of her first visit to Las Vegas in 1966. At that time, the Nevada city was already a byword for pleasure-seeking and sin, but it was architecturally unexplored territory. Scott Brown's trip, with her husband and partner Robert Venturi, was a fateful moment for their profession. They would return two years later with a whole class of Yale students to study the place in detail – the result, in 1972, was Learning From Las Vegas, a book that scandalised the architectural establishment simply by paying attention to the unique, dizzying landscape of the Strip in the desert.

More walkable and urban than you might think.

Today, Las Vegas still has the ability to jolt the first-time visitor. It announces itself in an almost sickening moment of existential shock. From Tom Wolfe's Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby to CSI, culture has furnished such a detailed mental picture of Las Vegas that it's almost unsettling to discover that the place is really real. It's like discovering that Narnia really exists. But it's a different wonderland to the one explored by Venturi and Scott Brown 40 years ago. The Las Vegas of Learning From Las Vegas was a low-rise landscape punctuated with spectacular signs. Now, the buildings are the spectacle. The Strip is a procession of architectural set-pieces unlike anything else on Earth, from the high-rise turbo-classicism of Caesar's Palace and the Luxor techno-pyramid to the inimitable imitations of Paris, New York and Venice. There are Disney turrets at the Excalibur and a working volcano at the Mirage, eruptions hourly. In a neat plutocratic pairing, the metallic-brown Wynn resembles an 1960s executive desk-top cigarette lighter, while the gold-clad (literally, gold) Trump is pure Benson & Hedgefund. The Circus Circus, one of the Strip's more venerable hotels, mocked as the screaming nadir of middlebrow bad taste by Hunter S Thompson, is now positively dowdy by comparison.

CityCenter. Helmut Jahn's Veer towers are centre; the blue building at right is Norman Foster's Harmon. Below the Harmon, Daniel Libeskind's Crystals mall.

In the midst of this menagerie is a new beast, bigger than the others and strange in comparison: a gleaming cluster of towers called CityCenter. This is the latest reinvention of Las Vegas – the newest form thrown up in this extraordinary melting pot of atavistic leisure, consumer surrealism, and corporate hypermoney. “Hypermoney” isn't an exaggeration. This project comes festooned with superlatives and eye-popping stats, but among the most impressive is the fact that it's the single largest private development in the United States. $9 billion – or $11 billion, depending on who you listen to – has been plonked down on the roulette table here, just as the ball skips towards the double-zero of a global recession. A joint venture between resort corporation MGM Mirage and Dubai World, the horribly troubled investment wing of the government of Dubai, the CityCenter project has persistently flirted with crisis and bankruptcy, and against the mounting odds opened for business early this year. Whether it succeeds or fails, it's a fascinating new mutation in a place that has been an urban laboratory for half a century.

The Veer. Cesar Pelli's Aria hotel is the curved building below.

CityCenter isn't just a name – it's a statement of intent. The project is described in the plentiful, excitable publicity material that surrounds it as a “city within a city”, a “new urban core” for Las Vegas. 18 million square feet of space over 67 acres is divided into half a dozen hotels and casinos – a Mandarin Oriental and new brands with somewhat abstract names including “Aria” and “Vdara” - in an thicket of towers, most of which are so aesthetically restrained by Vegas standards that they would not stand out in Canary Wharf. These are arranged around the most striking buildings in the complex, the leaning Veer towers and a shopping mall by Daniel Libeskind that goes by the name of, and shape of, Crystals. Libeskind is just one of the starchitect names involved in the project: Foster & Partners designed the Harmon hotel, Rafael Vinoly was responsible for the Vdara and Cesar Pelli contributed the flagship Aria. It goes far beyond manufacturing a simulacrum of a city as a decorative theme, in the same manner as the New York, New York next door or the Paris across the Strip – it wants to be a genuine “urban environment”. As well as the mall, it will have a residential population, a density of construction similar to Manhattan, and it is designed to be walkable, linking up with neighbouring casinos in a web of promenades.

A "street" within CityCenter, leading towards Crystals.

That's a world of difference to the Las Vegas Venturi and Scott Brown discovered 40 years ago. Then, Las Vegas was new and extraordinary because it was designed entirely with the car in mind. At the roadside were the lavish neon signs intended to lure motorists into comparatively modest modernist buildings set back away from the street behind a forecourt of parking. Pedestrians were not encouraged. Once you had parked, the mob-backed management was not going to make it easy for you to stroll over to one of their competitors down the street. The interiors were dark and confusing – it's still hard to tell if it's night or day in most Vegas casinos. Little was permitted to divert from the gambling. But when the architects were compiling their study of this unique landscape, it was already changing. The eccentric aviation mogul Howard Hughes also pitched up in Las Vegas in 1966, installing himself in the top floor of the Desert Inn. When the management tried to eject him (Hughes what could be called “hygiene issues”, and his penthouse wasn't cleaned once in the four years he occupied it) he bought the hotel. Then he bought another, and another, until he had bought up half a dozen resorts.

Crystals, with the Harmon behind. Libeskind is here a kind of Las Vegas entertainer, still belting out the same old repertoire of former hits, but flatter and fatter than before.

Hughes' spree ended the mob's stranglehold on the ownership of casinos and greatly improved Las Vegas' reputation, painting it as a playground for tycoons. Perhaps more significantly, it opened up the Strip to big business, paving the way for corporate ownership of casinos. Since then, the corporations have shaped Las Vegas in unexpected ways. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Las Vegas flirted with becoming a family-friendly destination, a trend that didn't last but which kicked off the spate of super-themes, where the branding of a hotel was extended to become a form of entertainment in itself, from the Treasure Island's scheduled pirate battles to the New York New York's skyline and rollercoaster. Steve Wynn, the billionaire local power broker who developed the Mirage and the Treasure Island, followed them in 1998 with his master stroke, the Bellagio, a hugely luxurious hotel-casino that reasserted the city's status as a destination for high rollers.

And the Bellagio pointed straight to CityCenter. Ironically, Strip's new-found friendliness towards the pedestrian over the automobile isn't the result of enlightened planning or a sudden appreciation for the so-called “new urbanism”, which stresses the value of compact neighbourhoods. It's the result of the concentration of corporate interests into a near duopoly. Two corporations – MGM Mirage and Harrah's – now own the vast majority of all property on the Strip. They are no longer motivated to keep visitors in one place because they own most of the other places – indeed, both companies have suddenly taken an interest in public transport, after a fashion, building tram and monorail lines to ferry punters between their properties. It's an urban landscape drawn like a company org-chart, with different corporate holdings linked up by micro-rail and footbridges.

At CityCenter, lower-scale visitors are essentially extras in an fabulously expensive display of Potemkin urbanism – as they stroll between the fountains, the public art and Libeskind's mall, they're providing the traffic and energy that will give the new district a sense of urbanity. This is for the benefit of the upscale residents – the super-wealthy who will be buying the condo vacation homes in the Veer towers, the Harmon and the Mandarin Oriental. CityCenter isn't obviously themed – indeed, the abstract nature of the branding of its hotels gives them a slightly unnerving lack of conceptual context, like seeing an animatronic stripped of its fur and reduced to a swivel-eyed cyborg. But there is a kind of theme. In a way it's a distillation of the idea of the “world city”, familiar to the residents of London, Paris and New York, where it can feel that the bulk of the residents are there just to provide a lively backdrop for multi-homed mega-rich non-dom top tier. The genius of Venturi and Scott Brown's study of Las Vegas was to show how this unique place in Nevada could teach us about every place – a lesson that would only work if one approached the subject without moral or aesthetic judgement. CityCenter is the same. This glittering enclave is a model of how a globalised elite is re-shaping the idea of the city, and how the rhetoric and practice of walkability, public art and vibrant urbanism can comfortably serve corporate monoculture as well as it serves the healthy metropolis. Like the rest of Las Vegas, it's a genuinely fascinating and exciting place – but also not a little scary.

Belgrade Pomo

I was in Belgrade, Serbia, last week for Belgrade Design Week. It's a brilliant place and I'll try to do a longer blog post on some of the interesting buildings I saw within the next few days. Meanwhile here's one oddity which I found particularly provocative. (My thanks to Murphy for suggesting that it get a blog post to itself.)

While taking a directionless stroll through the back-streets around Knez Mihailova, a main shopping street, an interesting glass silo caught my eye.


I went in for a closer look (clik on any of these images for a larger version) and found a rare bit of Serbian post-modernism attached to it. Belgrade doesn't have a terrific amount of architecture from the 1990s, for the obvious reasons, and consequently not a lot of pomo. But here it is in all its glory, completely with tiny balcony, wilful asymmetry, classical detail and a zigzag like a page layout from The Face in the 1980s. It's also clearly taking cues from the Tito-era apartment block on the left. But this is nothing.


Wait a second ...


Blimey.


Now that's something. Generally speaking this kind of plastic-glass, styrofoam-masonry jokey pastiche makes me want to vomit my eyes out, but there's a lot going on here. Look at the way the roofline of the glass atrium pick up on the pediment of the window above the cornice. Just below the cornice, look at the leftmost of the smaller windows. See the way the square of the window-panes in that window merges with the larger panes of glass in the atrium structure. Boss. It's a horrible building, but at the same time there's a lot of enjoyment to be had from its layers. I certainly stopped and stared for quite some time.

Pocket Utopias

Kanakee Ward, Kanakee State Hospital, Illinois, from Christopher Payne's book Asylum. (Via)

Ruins are seemingly inescapable nowadays - here I am reviewing a beautiful book of photographs of America's decaying mental hospitals. Here, and here, are the details of the book itself.

I was given a pleasingly generous word limit for the piece, which of course I used to the full, and I'm not surprised that an unlucky sub has had to cut it quite a bit. That's all for the best, but here's a paragraph from the original with some interesting details:

These hospitals were built at an extraordinary pace from the middle of the 19th century until into the 20th century. At the time, alternative treatment for mental illness was non-existent – madness was a route to destitution, imprisonment and early death. Reformers campaigned for the construction of homes for the mentally ill, and American states – frothing with prosperity and neophyte civic pride – competed to build them bigger and better. The clamour, crowds, pollution and disorder of urban life were thought to contribute to insanity, so the new hospitals were built outside towns and cities on open land. The designs were utopian – they included gardens for rest and pleasure, and agricultural land so that the patients could work. Many hospitals were self-sufficient. The buildings were, for the time, high-tech, with central heating and gaslight – in period photographs, they could be mistaken for resort hotels. Hospitals were, after the 1850s, generally laid out according the “Kirkbride” plan, with a central block for administration and staff quarters, from which stretched two long wings, one for each sex. Self-sufficient, highly centralised and controlled, removed from the depredations of industrial civilisation and minutely organised according to sex, class and condition, the Kirkbride hospitals were 19th-century pocket utopias.

(Some very repetitive writing there, and the rhythm isn't great. Drat.)

There were two striking elements to this part of the story for me: first, that cities and urban life were thought to cause or exacerbate madness, and second the conscious utopianism of asylum design. The anti-urban taint to the philosphy behind the hospitals is interesting. And as the asylums are total environments – in contrast to other 19th-century institutional buildings, such as prisons, schools and workhouses, they provide for every aspect and stage of a person's life – there is unparalleled scope for turning them into little models of a perfect world, a “pocket utopia”. With that in mind, it's possible to see in greater detail their appeal to 19th-century social reformers.

A hospital on the Kirkbride plan.

Those two strands, then, connect in my mind these giant asylums with the Garden City Movement. There's that same hygienic concern with separating people from the malign influence of the big bad city and reconnecting them with the healing powers of the rural landscape. And there's also that stifling clerkish utopianism: the winged Kirkbride plans of mental hospitals have the same organisational impulse in them as Ebenezer Howard's compass-drawn plans for garden conurbations, orderly orbiting planets in a universe set right.

Ebenezer Howard's Garden City concept.

In between the suburb-planets of Howard's garden cosmos, what do we see? Insane asylums, homes for waifs, epileptic farms, homes for inebriates. The social debris of the 19th century, and the casualties of industrial society, being looked after – but also out of the way. It's a mistake to write off these reforming instincts as pure anti-urban prejudice, as the 19th-century city was undoubtedly an unhealthy place to live. But the 19th-century concern was social contagion as much as poor housing or air pollution. Mentally ill people were seen as a potentially destabilising force while in the cities – their removal was for the health of society as much as for their own good. The Garden City is the world run as a Victorian hospital.

Olympic Ramble

These are some photographs taken on a recent walk around part of the perimeter of the Olympic site in east London. The walk was part of a Constructing Sites workshop organised by Gesche Wuerfel at Goldsmiths University's Centre for Urban and Community Research, with the photographers Tristan Fennell and David Kendall. It was a scorching 27 June, and what these photographs don't show is me getting horribly sunburned.


Hackney Wick.


Gate, and tower of unknown purpose.


A peek through the above gate. A distinct sense of post-zombie-apocalypse military checkpoint. That said, some of Hackney Wick looks like that all the time, only without the blue fencing. The blue fencing - immortalised by Iain Sinclair, here - reminded me very strongly of the sky-painted utopian housing in Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

Brazil picture from this magnificient site.


However, the fence is being taken down and replaced with a more straightforward electric fence, seen here behind an outer non-electric safety fence, which will weed out the less determined and stupid miscreants.


A small stretch of blue fence is still there, deviating around some trees in the sort of highly visible micro-courtesy that often serves as a shield for some obscured Godzilla incourtesy. Still, it's sort of charming.


Regeneration, in all its glory. It was algae mardi gras in the canal. There was so much photosynthesis going on it almost felt wrong to look.


A bosky-looking jetty. Good graffiti, too. Graffiti on the blue fence was overpainted in hours, but aparently it has surged in the surrounding area. An outer ring of paint, symbiotic with the inner ring of blue paint.

It looks a bit angry.


Artists' studios in warehouses.


Surreal suburban interlude. This is the house they used to film the Big Breakfast. The blue fence passes right through its garden.


Security as insecurity. Picket fence, security fence, razor wire, and that's before you get to the actual perimeter. West Ruislip meets the West Bank. At right: Tristan Fennell. Top right: the stadium.


The stadium. You can order that brickwork by the square foot. But the white steel will cost you.


Anti-canoe measures where the River Lea meets the Lee Navigation (Hackney Cut).


Anti-climb measures, with the stadium behind.


Left to right: Tristan Fennell, Gesche Wuerfel and David Kendall. Behind: perimeter patrol in high-vis with alsatian. David said that photographers in ones and twos often get stopped and told that photography of the perimeter is not permitted (a fallacy). We were not bothered, presumably because there were a dozen of us, not including the film crew. I'll link to the film when it's cut together.


The patrol passes over the Lea bridge after declining the opportunity to be photographed. The fellow in the red shirt is sketching - I don't know if that's allowed or not.


Regeneration. My wife tells me that the feng shui of this building is radioactive, with the pointy bits jutting over the water or something.


The Northern Outfall Sewer just before it becomes the Greenway.


"J.W. Bazalgette, Engineer." Yes he was.


The stadium from the Greenway. Impromptu office buildings in the foreground.


Here you can see part of a scaffolding causeway connecting the site with the Greenway. It's a bad photograph because some security gentlemen became very agitated when I attempted to take a good photograph.


London Concrete, with Canary Wharf a surprisingly long way in the background.


View over the site's main vehicle entrance. I assume it was the main vehicle entrance, because there was a vast amount of traffic - a constant stream of lorries, plant and buses entering and leaving. This was on a Saturday. There was a terrific sense of industry and urgency. In the background is the skeleton of Zaha Hadid's Aquatics Centre.


The stadium. In the foreground are some brightly coloured hoardings with commands directed at site-workers on them: "Be Aware!" "Be considerate!" "Be responsible!" Construction workers are always harangued like this, but it's a distinctly authoritarian touch in the Olympic typeface and the New Labour fluorescent palette. DCMS meets DPRK.


A closeup of the Aquatics Centre. I generally try to avoid "alien spacecraft" cliches, but it could be Battlestar Pegasus in the shipyard.


A stretch of the Greenway that had been popular as a viewing area had been fenced off - more nibbling at the public realm. Security men stood watch.


It was hot - very hot. There is little shade on the Greenway. The security guard who was watching the former viewing area had improvised a little shelter by attaching fallen branches to a fence. Not an enviable job, standing there all day.


Who's this "us"?


Into "the labyrinth", where the Greenway has been closed and pedestrians have to pass through what amounts to a security checkpoint in a dogleg bend.


Inside "the labyrinth". Places like this are fascinating. I'm increasingly interested in the subject of zones and the disintegration of the city's public space into a patchwork of varying legalities. Our state society is becoming increasingly fixated on identity, ID. This concern is presented as a result of concerns about terrorism (of course), but also as a way of safeguarding "our" rights so that they're not "abused" by people who don't belong in the magic club of citizenship. Look at the first groups affected by ID card legislation - foreigners resident here, and airline/airport staff with access to the sacred "airside" zone - simultaneously one of the most secure and insecure places in the UK, the place we overlap with the rest of the world. Anyway, ID obsession is no way of guaranteeing rights, it's a way of denying them, ultimately breaking the whole city and country into spaces where people "belong" and (more importantly) "don't belong".


At the moment, with little ID infrastructure in place, when you're in a semi-public but highly controlled space like "the labyrinth", the authorities are forced to assume that you belong. They hate this. With an ID infrastructure in place, they're safe to assume that you "don't belong", and the onus is on you to justify your presence there. In places like "the labyrinth", we can see the architecture and mechanisms of this infrastructure being rehearsed. It is at its most developed, I think, in the West Bank.


David Kendall in "the labyrinth".


Something a bit Wild West about this gate. Appropriately, it was High Noon.


A bowser spraying water - I think to keep down dust.


On the left, one of the ugliest buildings in London. Portacabin aesthetics.


For pity's sake, that's atrocious.


The Fence absorbs a signpost like some spreading alien presence out of early JG Ballard. No through road.


I love this photograph. The church is gone.


Lock-keeper's cottage, a bizarre survivor just off the ultra-urban main road into Stratford. New security infrastructure keeps an eye.


Greenway fact: Gandhi like to walk along it when he was a law student in London before the First World War.


The fence was punctured up ahead - they appear to be building a jetty for accepting deliveries by barge. We went to have a closer look.


The path along the riverside had been blocked by The Fence, and the fly-tippers have moved into its amputated remains. Some fibreglass cornices from an obsolete effort at home improvement.


Fly-tippers. The filth here was indescribable.


RIVER. Plus blocked archway, as if it has been filled in with that coloured gunk dentists use.


This was the only Union flag I saw on the site, which was something of a surprise. I expected more national symbols.


I only saw one of these, as well - inconspicuous, bolted to the end of a crash barrier. An early hint at future walking routes, or a leftover from an old route now truncated. We terminated the walk at Pudding Mill Lane and went to Greenwich for lunch and to discuss the day.

There are more photographs on my Flickr stream.