The Crystals *IS* An Airplane Hangar Now!

I've been calling the God-awful Daniel Liebskind-designed Crystals "entertainment complex" at CityCenter an airplane hangar since my first preview tour of the place. Now they're going to prove me right. Check this press release out:

From January 6-8, Las Vegas will be treated to the first interior exhibit on The Strip of the Cirrus Aircraft SR22T. Taking center stage next to some of the best names in fashion, dining and nightlife, the SR22T will spread its wings and invite Crystals’ guests to climb aboard into the intimate setting of this luxurious plane. The turbo-charged SR22T will feature an interactive exhibit for guests. This hands-on display incorporates a special demo mode to allow interested persons to experience the SR22T in all its glory – climbing into the cockpit, trying out the controls, and exploring the advanced avionics and four-seat plush cabin – everything but take-off!

Guests also can engage in the “Cirrus Perspective” glass cockpit, allowing them to simulate a real test-flight and experience operating the SR22T. Two large screens will invite guests to try out the plane’s flight controls and navigation system. Cirrus representatives will be on-hand January 6-8 from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. each day to answer questions and guide guests through their personalized flight experience.

It certainly sounds cool, I'll give them that. But is it enough to keep you from Cosmo?

New Yorker: CityCenter Neither a City Nor a Center

The current issue of The New Yorker takes on CityCenter and the results are pretty brutal.

It's ostensibly an architecture review by a Pulitzer winner, and on that score several of the buildings get pretty good marks individually. But the damning conclusion is that, despite Jim Murren's vaunted city planning studies and art history minor and ongoing blah-blah theories about the project, it fails to accomplish anything that Murren has claimed it would. To wit:

Even though there is more density to CityCenter than there is to anything else in Las Vegas, and more sophistication to its architecture, it doesn’t feel urban. Its planners have crammed more square footage into a tighter space than anyone else has managed in Las Vegas, and that may make this place seem like an antidote to sprawl. But it still isn’t much of a center, or much of a city. Indeed, as you drive around the site, you suddenly wonder if CityCenter only appears to be different from the rest of the Strip. After all, cutting-edge contemporary architecture by the likes of Libeskind and Foster has been migrating steadily into the cultural mainstream for years. Now, perhaps, it has reached the point where it is familiar enough, and likable enough, to be just another style available for imitation, like the Pyramids or Renaissance Venice. CityCenter is the Las Vegas you already know, but in modernist drag.

That, of course, is a fancy way of saying precisely what RateVegas' Hunter Hillegas is quoted as saying in my L.A. Weekly piece from last year before CityCenter opened:

“They like to say that CityCenter is unique, and you won’t find the word theme anywhere in their press material,” he offers. “But it’s city-themed.”

There is some other interesting stuff in Paul Goldberger's piece, namely that he rejects an idea explored in some depth on the last episode of the Vegas Gang podcast that the project ought to have been built in stages. That, Goldberger says, "would have been too restrained." He also lays much blame for the failure of Harmon on Lord Norman Foster, the architect, for an uninteresting building regardless of its construction snafus.

CityCenter's saving grace, beyond the Veer Towers which he finds cool and dramatic, is one thing almost everyone else agrees sucks: The Crystals mall.

Jagged, crystalline shapes are characteristic of Libeskind, and while they have proved problematic in some of the museums he has designed, here they inject the normally dreary precinct of a shopping mall with a shot of adrenaline; they also provide some unexpectedly grand spaces, which accommodate interiors designed by David Rockwell.

Yeah. Because you want your malls to look like airplane hangars and feel empty and absent of activity regardless of how many people inhabit them. And Rockwell's mammoth penis really resolves that.

Still, it's an interesting take from a sophisticate who, of course, is mentally stuck in early 1990s Vegas. He spends nearly half his piece arguing CityCenter as an antidote for "theme-park Vegas" and ignoring the fact that the last themed casino, the Aladdin, opened more than nine years ago. Since then, we've seen Wynn, Encore, Palazzo, Trump, Signature, Palms Place, South Point, Suncoast, M, Aliante and Red Rock Resort. Wow, CityCenter really turned that tide!

[Top photo of CityCenter taken moments ago from the balcony at the unthemed Signature.]

Puck Shucks Bistro For Pizza

This may be a first: Wolfgang Puck's Brasserie PUCK at CityCenter's Crystals has been renamed and rethemed. Instead of it being bistro-esque, today it reopens as Wolfgang Puck Pizzeria & Cucina.

This would be like Cirque deciding to replace Criss Angel Believe with Donny & Marie after six months. In Puck's 18-year history of restaurants in Vegas, I don't believe there's ever been an instance where he's opened up in one direction and decided in very short order to give it up and go an entirely different direction. In fact, I'm not sure any of his restaurants ever underwent *any* reconception and only one that I know of, the late, great Chinois, has ever closed in Las Vegas.

What does it mean? Well, clearly Puck & Co. realize the clientele visiting Aria and Crystals are more down-market than they once expected. They must have figured being around these huge, hyper-expensive shops on an $8.5 billion campus would have meant people looking for a serious, sit-down dining experience.

But, no. At least at Crystals, they want pizza. Not a good sign for MGM Mirage.

A CityCenter Tour Pictorial

I debated what image to use atop this post. I could have shown this cool one below, from the foot of Veer Tower...


...but as a Chinese friend of mine used to say when I lived in Beijing and took his photo with his camera, "Too much sky."

I could have picked this fun one, evidence that Cirque du Soleil is in da hood:


Or certainly, there's this view of the awesome Nancy Rubins suspended-canoes sculpture that is destined to become iconically identified with the $8.5 billion, 67-acre project:


But, alas, I kept coming back -- as I predict most will -- to the heart of it all, and the heart of CityCenter is the same as the heart of everything else in Vegas: The hotel-casino. And a pretty, gleaming, shimmery thing that is, huh?

Yes, I toured CityCenter more than 10 days ago. And I apologize for not posting all of this sooner except that I had a gazillion deadlines, 21 hours of poker to observe and a gag order about internal details of Aria and Vdara that was unofficially lifted when MGM Mirage let Norm Clarke go Tweeting every last detail he saw during a tour last Friday. Kinda silly that I can't talk about the poker-card-sculpture walls for Aria's poker room when Norm gets to describe the "over-sized Elvis belt buckles cover[ing] the exterior"of Viva Elvis and the showroom's "very high proscenium" and decor that "reflects the Elvis era at Kirk Kerkorian's The International rather than contemporary."

What I don't feel comfortable doing as yet, gag order or not, is judging the place. I have some first impressions -- CityCenter does not feel as crowded when you're in it as when you view it from afar, the artwork is really pretty terrific, Aria's casino is surprisingly dark and low-ceiling'd considering how much natural light pours in all over the rest of the place, the Crystals is so massive it runs the risk of feeling empty even when thousands of people are inside and I, unlike Hunter Hillegas of RateVegas.Com, find the poker-card sculpture thing cool -- but until the place is actually inhabited, it's hard to be fair. I did find it funny that Cirque waited so long to announce the name of Viva Elvis that the casino signage just says, "Elvis Theater."

Photography wasn't permitted on anyone's tours so far inside the buildings, but there was lots to look at from the outside, too. For instance, I'd seen the 23rd-floor (right?) sky lobby of the Mandarin Oriental from the Strip side, but there's a cut-out on the other side that I believe has some relevance to the electrical and a/c systems in the building.


The circuitous roads throughout the complex gave a bit of an airport terminal feel to the front of Aria:


...and I saw the train system that goes from Bellagio to Monte Carlo is getting tested:


Here's the side of the tram station, which is up there above, under the white canopy:


Some other random vistas are below, including a close-up of the side of Veer, a shot of where part of the swoopy roofing of the Crystals attaches, I think, to the northeastern part of Aria, the front of Aria from ground level and a view to the Strip from the same location:


That last one above looms over a "pocket park," a quiet sitting area where the Henry Moore reclining lady sculpture sits. I wasn't allowed to shoot that, but it was cute.

Clearly, there's still lots left to do before the Dec. 1-16 openings of the various components:


Check out the license plate on the scooter in the parking lot of the buildings along Frank Sinatra Drive where the CityCenter peeps are operating. Appropriate, given that half the place is owned by the UAE gang, right?


What I will say is that Steve Wynn routinely talks about his places having a series of moments that affect you emotionally. Even incomplete, CityCenter has that. And more than any other new project in Vegas probably since the Mirage, what they did here will be debated. And that debate should be fun to observe.

But before we go, just a little homage. See this?


See the orange thing peeking through? No matter how many times the MGM Mirage gang denies it, they succeed with CityCenter in part if they make Bellagio less relevant, less the center of gravity. And that's just a little sad, no?

NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You're building this beautiful and stately structure with perhaps the best international reputation for elegance, service and grace, and then you...


Put a wrap on it?!?!?

Please, please, please, please, please, Mandarin Oriental Las Vegas peeps. Tell me that's just there right now to gin up some interest in advance of the opening at CityCenter in December. Tell me that when you open, you're not going to make your building look like...


...this. Just sayin'.

And while I was stuck in traffic looking at that terrible scaffolding, I turned the other way and noticed that...


...the Paris balloon needs a paint job, stat. Has it had one in the 10 years the place has been open?

I did think that the sign for the Louis Vuitton at The Crystals was kinda cool and refined:



Well, at least until those neat severe angles of this Daniel Libeskind design get cluttered with all the other logos. This one works because the LV also has similar severe angles and, also, there's a double-entendre in there. But think they'll leave well enough alone? Really?

Finally, I've been eager to see what the Mandarin Oriental interiors will look like. The website still has what appear to be renderings of the rooms. I mean, it's hard to tell since they're tiny thumbnail images that can't be enlarged. The executive suite one, in fact, is a photo of a flower on a table with the base of a lamp.

BUT! This splash-page image, presumably of a lounge or restaurant, is insightful:


Look out the window! It turns out that the Mandarin Oriental Las Vegas is going to be...in some other city! With lots of glittery high-rises! How grand! I wonder if there'll be a shuttle of some sort!