Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne offers a take on Las Vegas' new CityCenter mega project, highlighting the project's faux-urbanism and what in the end is disappointingly conservative architecture.
"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."
Read the full story: In Las Vegas, one final echo of the boom years
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