The 2010 issue of Casino Design, a supplement to Global Gaming Business, is out now. It’s filled with tons of great articles with many perspectives on how and why casinos look the way they do. I’d like to point you towards the cover story, a massive look at how CityCenter developed, from drawing board to opening. If you open the digital edition, it starts on page 22:
At the November 9, 2004 press conference that unveiled the concept, then-CEO Terry Lanni said that the CityCenter master plan represented “a significant new direction for our city and our company,” adding that it came at a time when the city was taking “the initial steps to becoming a major urban center in the western United States.”
At that press conference, MGM Mirage unveiled a idea more than a commodity. Only a few things were certain: Project CityCenter would be built on land between the Bellagio and Monte Carlo which the company had recently consolidated with its acquisition of Mandalay Resort Group. It would feature a four-thousand room casino resort, three smaller boutique hotels, and 1,650 condominium residences that would give the area a 24-hour, “city-like” ambience. The centerpiece was to have been an open-air shopping district—definitely not a mall—whose streets allowed both pedestrian and vehicular traffic.
One of the things I found most interested was the way the project seemed to evolve along with the market until late 2007, when it became almost a work of defiance against what was happening around it.
In his editorial introduction (page 4), Roger Gros summed up, better than I could have, what I think the current legacy of CityCenter is: “Good design thrives on pushing the envelope,” he writes. “MGM Resorts is to be admired for taking the steps to advance the casino design industry to new levels.” If no one tried new things, we’d still be rolling bones in caves, eating antelope tartare in the darkness. That doesn’t mean that CityCenter’s necessarily going to point the way to the next stage in casino design: ultimately, casino patrons will decide that, and, as Gros says, that will take some time.
Good magazine all the way through.