Style : Future World : With Vegas as a Model--Really!--Our Cities Might Not Be So Grim After All

“Look Outside,” I said. “Why?” “There’s a big...machine in the sky...some kind of electric snake...coming straight at us.” “Shoot it,” said my attorney. “Not yet,” I said. “I want to study its habits.”

- HUNTER S. THOMPSON “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”

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It’s 9 p.m. at the new Treasure Island hotel-casino, and 36 floors below me, a zillion people are standing shoulder to shoulder, waiting for another galleon to blow up. They’re getting antsy, but they won’t have to wait long--it happens every hour. When they’re not watching pirates take over the civilized world or viewing the exploding volcano at the Mirage next door, they’re happily gambling away their money under chandeliers cast from models of human skeletons. And I’m sitting above this new Las Vegas, my PowerBook balanced on top of scholarly tomes about architecture, trying to make sense of it all.

Is what’s happening here real? Or have I somehow become a figure in the futuristic painting I was admiring this morning at Las Vegas City Hall? In the painting, which hangs in the city manager’s conference room, inhabitants of tomorrow’s Las Vegas, dressed in spacesuits, look out from a wide promenade. It is night, prime time. Immense skyscrapers fill the city, a 1,000-foot spire rises from a bowl-shaped building, and spaceships zoom through glittering lights. The painting promises a world of vast expanses held together by a three-dimensional grid of air-traffic lanes and street lights.

But that faraway future, painted only nine years ago, is marching toward downtown Las Vegas right now. New hotel-casinos and attractions, so large and so strange that I can’t quite understand how they got here, are having an impact on more than the architectural landscape. I’m convinced that these mammoth apparitions are offering us a new kind of urban center: They’re transforming Las Vegas, a real city, into a realm of fantasy, and conversely, they’re building a set of fantasies into a real city.

Luxor, Excalibur, MGM Grand, the Forum Shops and Bob Stupak’s Stratosphere Tower--these creations are the future, not only of Las Vegas but of American cities. Collectively, they create a metropolis whose huge scale is bound by lights and set design rather than by walls and streets. In the new Las Vegas, anything is possible. You just have to take a leap of faith and accept this strange place, immersing yourself in it.

As a student of architecture, I know we can learn from Las Vegas. We’ve been doing so ever since 1972, when architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour published their seminal critique, “Learning From Las Vegas.” In that slender little paean to the outrageous signs and labyrinthine, nocturnal casinos, they asked us to take seriously not just the Las Vegas Strip, but all the commercial strips in every town in America. They pointed out that energy exists in a strip’s signs, cars and contemporary architecture. The authors ventured to hope for the emergence of an “electronic expressionism” that would turn this chance collage into a style for our times.

Earlier, as my plane landed in Las Vegas, I realized that the lessons taught by the old Strip have been left far behind. Circling the dark form of Luxor, I saw a new world waiting to be discovered and analyzed. A slick, black glass pyramid rising 357 feet from the desert floor, the 2-month-old Luxor holds down the southern edge of the Strip. Even as I walked around it, I found that its abstract shape makes it difficult to understand exactly how large the building is, but it is almost the same size as the original pyramids in Egypt. Inside this slightly menacing monolith, the world’s largest atrium disappears past more than 2,500 hotel rooms into a mist that is periodically split by the play of lasers. But not only could I watch, I could also experience . Upstairs in VirtuaLand, a state-of-the-art Sega gaming arcade, I tumbled around in a virtual-reality flight simulator, the R-360, rotating end over end while trying to shoot down an unnamed enemy. I debated going downstairs and gambling amid acres of lights, but I opted for the motion-simulator rides instead. “The Theater of Time,” housed in an angular, black glass tomb, displays on a seven-story screen a world that looks a lot like the future Las Vegas in that painting at City Hall.

Next, I stepped onto a bullet-shaped tram and rode across to the 4,032-room Excalibur, two immense towers of concrete that step away in the middle to reveal a cartoon version of a medieval castle. The model for the colorful spires and oversized turrets of this functionless fortification was itself a fantasy: Neuschwanstein, built for Mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria in the 19th Century to evoke dreams of shining knights and medieval damsels in distress. Here, the search for the Grail is cast in terms of gambling, encapsulating dreams of glory and fears of bankruptcy in a fairy tale blown up to the scale of a city.

Crossing over the drawbridge at the front of Excalibur, I was confronted with what will be the largest hotel in the world when it opens next weekend, the 5,005-room MGM Grand. Its corridors are longer than a football field and its swimming pool is so expansive that the health department classifies it as a swimming lagoon. This is Oz--a yellow brick road leading to 171,500 square feet of gambling and a 33-acre theme park--an immense fantasy domain that belies what is really a large, bland building when viewed from outside.

These three new hotels at Tropicana Boulevard form what has become known as the New Four Corners of the Strip. For my taste, however, the first Four Corners--at Las Vegas and Flamingo boulevards, home to Caesars Palace, the Mirage and Treasure Island--is still where all the action is. Here, the throngs were so thick that I could barely make my way from one casino to the next. The street isn’t defined in the usual way, by traditional buildings with traditional doors. Instead, the sidewalk flows into and out of casinos, past neon signs and wide-open spaces. Periodically, actors dressed in elaborate centurion costumes spread the crowds to make way for Caesar and Cleopatra, who invite you to join them inside Caesars Palace.

I followed the procession and found myself swept onto an inclined moving sidewalk. Going under seven triumphal arches, I rose past rushing waterfalls into the entrance of the Forum Shops, a swank arcade that evokes ancient Rome. On the hour, animated statues spring alive, inviting the crowd to shop and dine. I quickly lost my sense of time in this empire of commercialism, as the sun rises and sets on the cloud-dappled ceiling every 60 minutes.

A block north, I encountered the Mirage with its erupting volcano, jungle labyrinth, den of white tigers and bottle-nosed dolphin habitat. I got as lost as Dr. Livingstone in his search for the source of the Nile. Outside, I kept walking and the sidewalk beneath me became a wooden boardwalk alongside Buccaneer Bay, where two full-size galleons were doing battle. After much martial music, Errol Flynn-like acrobatics and pyrotechnics, the ship of law and order sank and the victorious pirates invited us to share their booty in Treasure Island’s casino, where chests of fake gold spill over the illusive riches of the gaming tables. The hotel’s tower houses 2,900 rooms in a perfunctory version of a New Orleans townhouse stretched to 36 floors. I checked in.

From my room, I could see the spire in the futuristic painting being built right now by brash Vegas World casino owner Bob Stupak. The Stratosphere Tower, a 1,012-foot-high Eiffel Tower-like attraction, has curving concrete legs that are already taller than the surrounding high-rise hotels. When it is completed at the end of next year, it will be the tallest tower in the United States.

What amazes me about the new Las Vegas is not just the size of new buildings but the inventiveness and thoroughness with which hotel-casinos disguise their real business--that is, gambling and lodging--behind these elaborate stage sets. Moreover, all of the scenarios compete with each other, allowing you to bounce back and forth between fragments of dreams and nightmares in a setting that is so real that your reverie is continually interrupted by the honking of horns, the jostling of your fellow “theatergoers” and the sight of leftover souvenir shops, motels and liquor stores holding out in the shadows of these new spectacles. This uncontrolled, ragtag scenery is what keeps the Strip from becoming just another Disneyland with dice.

Vast areas like Orlando, Fla., or EuroDisney in France are simply theme parks, not cities. There are places within most cities, like shopping malls or theaters, where you can fantasize, but these places are carefully isolated in Muzak-like buildings. Crowded sidewalks, packed freeways, slums and glass office towers make cities into places that offer different experiences--alas, most of them dulling. Las Vegas condenses and transforms these experiences into a cacophony of sights and sounds. On the Strip, you are part of the most elaborate urban theater ever assembled.

After four decades of trying, Las Vegas has finally managed to turn Hollywood into reality. Luxor hired Douglas Trumbull, who created the special effects for “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and the “Back to the Future” ride at Universal Studios, to design its virtual-reality rides that bridge the gap between a theater experience and a real place. Treasure Island takes the next step by integrating its pirate show with the street. Scanning the long curve of the bay is like watching a whole movie in one place, a movie that threatens to spring to life. As Veldon Simpson, the architect of Luxor, Excalibur and MGM Grand points out: “Las Vegas is better than virtual reality because, in virtual reality, you have to trick your mind into thinking that you are someplace else. Here you are someplace else--many other places.”

Having figured out how to attract us, casino companies will continue to build more citadels of virtual reality. “Everybody now has to compete to make a building that is even more exciting than the last one,” Simpson says. A resort costing $1 billion will be constructed by ITT Sheraton; Mirage Resorts Inc., just blew up the Dunes so that it can be replaced with a Mediterranean resort where little white villas will dot the shore of the largest man-made lake in the world. Caesars Palace is spending $250 million to make its aging buildings look more like the J. Paul Getty Museum when seen from Flamingo Road, and I’m told that the El Rancho hotel is going to make way for a hotel tower masquerading as a pair of cowboy boots. Even downtown will be transformed into an electronic version of Main Street when a canopy of lights bridges the major Fremont Street casinos. Then the future vision of Las Vegas will have reached downtown. Maybe I can check myself into City Hall next time.

Even more exciting is the fact that Las Vegas is not altogether a safe and secure world. There is a purposeful element of foreboding in all of these new attractions. Luxor is a black object with no visible entrance, and its giant atrium, where you could stack nine jumbo jets, is gloomy because Simpson believes that the attraction of Las Vegas is that “it is slightly dangerous, sinful, it makes people feel on edge.” Luxor’s atrium is vertiginous. Standing by the railings of one of the top floors, I felt as if I were in almost as much danger as when I was laying down what money I had left on the tables far below. Similarly, Treasure Island is a spooky place for a 2,900-room luxury hotel: The door handles are skulls that split lengthwise when doors are opened, architectural details are formed from realistically rendered human bones, and a 60-foot skull that acts as the sign for the hotel has become the symbol of the whole place.

In a way, the Strip reflects the reality of a city that sits in the middle of some of the most unforgiving desert land in the country--Death Valley is not far away. There is no water in Las Vegas, except what man has created by damming the Colorado River. The desert has a forbidding scale and alien character that is matched only by the Strip. Man has made this world even more eerie through the liberal application of technology, including the nuclear test sites and Air Force bases that ring the city. There is not much logic to Las Vegas: There are no natural resources, and nothing is close by. This is what has allowed the city to become an outlaw place of escape.

Growing more than 71% during the past decade, it is now a city of almost 1 million people, and the danger doesn’t come just from nature anymore. Las Vegas has a large and growing homeless population, carefully kept off the Strip by a vigilant police force. MGM Grand boasts that its security force is one of the largest in the state. And the city is only going to get bigger and weirder and worse. It continues to attract almost 600,000 Angelenos a year, some of whom stay to work and live in what looked to me, as I drove around on Sunday morning, identical developments with few amenities such as recreation centers or parks.

In his new book “Viva Las Vegas,” architect and critic Alan Hess points out that the original casinos were designed by the same architects whose 1950s Googies coffee shops were like fragments of the future built into suburban Los Angeles. Here, the modernist dream of a brave new world continues on a much larger scale. The snazzy forms of the original casinos, as well as the shapes of the more recent ones, indicate that anything is possible--even the futuristic Las Vegas in the painting at City Hall.

In fact, the new Las Vegas is a Vegas-style remake of an urban form we know all too well. As Hess points out, Las Vegas is a conglomeration of high-rises, serviced by freeways and endless tract developments, that grow up along the perimeters of our major urban areas. Such “edge cities” (Warner Center in Canoga Park is a good example) usually show up tens, not hundreds, of miles away from a city center. Las Vegas is a model for the transformation of Los Angeles into a collection of edge cities that is both scary and exciting, but certainly not as bland as Irvine or Century City.

Granted, Las Vegas seems an unlikely model. This explosion of excessive illumination in the desert is an incredible use of resources and human energy where, despite family-oriented attractions, gambling remains the driving force. MGM Grand is green not just because that’s the color of the Emerald City, but also because that’s the color of money. The owners of Luxor chose that name not only to promote an Egyptian theme, but also because it conjured up dreams of luxury: Money is gambled away every day by people who can barely afford to live in the glamorous world Las Vegas has invented. I might even agree with Hunter S. Thompson that Las Vegas is “what the whole hep world would be doing on a Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war.” Yet as I watched the galleons sailing on Buccaneer Bay, I got caught up in the sheer power of this place. Imagination has run wild here, reinventing the city as we know it.

Las Vegas has always had the freedom to build absurdly elaborate places of escape. Geographic isolation, liberal laws and a risque image combine with a pioneer work ethic to produce a boomtown boosterism that has little patience with the worries of urban planners or moralists. What makes this new Las Vegas viable is the sheer density of experiences and urban moments that ricochet off each other, so that one sign is reflected in another and the whole Strip starts to look like an explosion in an endless electronic grid.

What we can learn from today’s Las Vegas and apply in our cities is that streets also can be theaters, buildings can become their own signs, and urban centers should be ever-changing environments. We have to accept the fact that our towns, suburbs and edge cities are completely artificial places just waiting for us to transform them into fantastic visions. They should not be enclosed shopping malls, isolated housing developments and closed-off office blocks but must be fluid, exciting and perhaps a little tacky. A city is not just about streets and buildings, it is about the experiences you have there. Harnessing myriad technologies allows heightened awareness and the ability to enjoy spaces we continually create.

Wander through the new world of Las Vegas. This place has more possibilities for urban life than can fit on a movie screen or in an amusement park. I certainly can’t fit it into this little PowerBook. But then they’re starting to blow up the galleon on Buccaneer Bay again. There’s a world of weirdness calling me to the elevator. Who needs virtual reality when you’ve got the real thing?