Architectural Inspiration week - The Fontainebleau Hotel, Las Vegas

This week, I'm going to write about spaces that have inspired emotion for me.  It's a personal journey into the definition of emotion-inducing architecture and how it inspires my in the way I think of the purpose of design.

I used to visit Vegas every year for about 10-14 days at a time.  It was for work and I enjoyed it.  I always enjoy travel and lament that I don't get to do as much of it as I once did.

Anyway, in my downtime in Vegas, usually in the early evenings, I would walk for miles up and down the strip, sight-seeing and exploring.  I would dart in and out of casinos, trying to find the fastest route from one end to the other like some sort of well-trained lab rat.  Sometimes I'd venture off the strip, but never too far.  The strip in Vegas is where all the action lies.

I would marvel at the massive (massive here feels like such an understatement) structures and all of the showy facades.  The lights, the free shows, the places that tried to pretend to be other places, American buildings disguised as far-away places.

Some people hate Las Vegas for all of the fakery, all of the bright lights and glitz and flash that always seem like it's trying to con you into doing something you'll regret much later.  After all, no one likes to be conned.

That's the beauty of that fantasy place in the desert.  It's a real place trying to prove to you it's real by attempting to convince you that it's not.  It's great.

I found the pre-recession building boom in that town more fascinating in relation to this trend.  The strip had just come out of a huge themed building boom where everyone wanted a big castle or the New York skyline or Paris or Venice.  That next building boom tried to push the strip into a more modern, urban look.

That building boom brought us City Center and The Wynn.  That's when The Cosmopolitan was started, finished soon after the recession.  That's also when they started the Fontainebleau.

It was another in what was supposed to be a city-defining tower on the strip.  It was to be sleek, it was to be glass, it was to have enormous video panels at street level.  It was to take its place as an urban design high-water mark among the other slick modern high rises taking the torch being passed from its heavily-themed counterparts.

It would have been beautiful and terrible.

Now it's just terrible.

They got so far as to build the entire building, clad the tower in glass then it just stopped.  Since 2007, it's been standing as a half-finished glass tower zombie, waiting  wearily for someone to come to finish and flip her.

Whenever I see this building, it makes me sad.  Not because I think it's particularly beautiful, there's something about the asymmetry of the tower that I find very unpleasant.  The base is too large and the building turns too much of it's backside to the street.

What makes me sad is that it simply sits empty with a ton of potential and no purpose.  It is an object that takes up space that will probably never be used for what it was intended.  It will probably live out its entire existence having never accomplished anything except being known as Las Vegas' largest, most expensive eyesore.

I want all spaces to succeed, be they permanent architectural statements or intentionally ephemeral art objects.  I dislike when a space, no matter my opinion about the merits of its design, never gets to fulfill its promise.