'A Palace for the Age of Towering Debt and Easy Credit'

"If CityCenter represents a final bender for Wall Street's decade of unreason -- and since this after all is Las Vegas -- it might at least have pursued a wilder, more inventive and more entertaining kind of architectural gigantism. Given MGM's declarations all along that this was going to be the first truly high-design development on the Strip, it's tough not to wander through the place and think – even if it's purely an architecture-lover's fantasy -- about what might have been if a really rip-roaring group of firms, one with a collective taste for scale, color, irony and abandon, had been allowed to drain that $8.5 billion budget."