Archinect - News

New resort and casino project approved for the Las Vegas Strip

2022-10-24T11:48:00-04:00

Officials in Clark County, Nevada, have voted to approve a new 43-story resort and casino project to be located on the Las Vegas Strip following a successful bid from Houston Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta.

According to Construction Dive, the scheme will include a 2,420-room hotel, 2,536-seat theater, chapel, retail, offices, and convention spaces on top of a multiple-level parking structure and be located nearby the larger Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino at 3725-3735 Las Vegas Boulevard South.

The plan will be developed over the next two years beginning tentatively in March and joins the city’s list of other major forthcoming post-pandemic projects, which to date includes DLR’s Group’s 21-story Dream Hotel, the soon-to-be-completed MSG Sphere by Populous, and the expanding Vegas Loop from Elon Musk’s The Boring Company.

An architect for the project has yet to be named. In a s...

Some of NYC’s biggest high-rollers want a casino in Coney Island, but local residents aren’t buying in

2022-08-04T10:00:00-04:00

If real estate developers get their way, Coney Island may soon be losing its seasonal vibe. The New York Post is reporting that several of the city's leading corporate entities, including Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross' Related Companies, Vornado, and S.L. Green, have expressed interest in two of the state's three new available casino licenses as part of an expansion endorsed by Governor Kathy Hochul.

Looking to Atlantic City as a model, Thor Equities owner Joe Sitt is pitching a gaming destination in his native Coney Island as a potential commercial booster. Hudson Yards, Times Square, and Queens’ Willets Point neighborhood have also been floated. In total, the projects could bring in at least $1.5 billion in license revenue for the state. The year-round operation of the casinos could engender even greater profits dependent on an agreed-upon tax rate between the state and potential developers.

Other than money, the subway system seems to be the main determining factor in the m...

Architect Alan Lapidus, son of Morris Lapidus, passes away at 85

2021-10-25T19:42:00-04:00

On October 15, architect Alan Lapidus passed away in his home in Naples, Maine after battling prostate cancer. His legacy is often connected with his architect father, Morris Lapidus, and being "Donald Trump's architect." However, after working with his father for many years, he used those lessons and experiences he gained to establish a long architecture career designing hotels and casinos.

In a New York Times obituary written by Sam Roberts, he notes that even when Lapidus etched a name for himself while working at his father's firm, "Mr. Lapidus did not try to outdo his father, whose motto was 'Too much is never enough.' But he followed his advice, designing palatial lodgings and capacious gambling halls to create 'participatory theater,' he wrote, in which guests could 'indulge and fulfill their fantasies.'"

Alan Lapidus in 2018 speaking on his career and time working with Fred and Donald Trump while building the now-demolished Trump Plaza and Casino in Atlantic City. Image stil...

Watch Trump Plaza implode in Atlantic City

2021-02-17T15:38:00-05:00

It was not the biggest or the best implosion ever. An auction for the right to detonate the dynamite to begin the implosion of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, N.J., fizzled. [...] The tower came down shortly after 9 a.m. amid a huge cloud of dust and an eruption of cheers.

Opened in 1984, Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino was the first of Donald Trump's three casino ventures in Atlantic City. All three ultimately went out of business, and while the former Trump Taj Mahal and Trump Marina Hotel Casino found new owners, it was the literal end for the Trump Plaza building today.

The auction that was originally announced to blow up the building was later canceled by building owner and billionaire investor Carl C. Icahn. The proceeds would have gone to the Boys & Girls Club of Atlantic City.

Atlantic City to auction off the opportunity to blow up Trump Plaza Casino

2020-12-17T15:28:00-05:00

The demolition of the former Trump Plaza casino will become a fundraiser to benefit the Boys & Girls Club of Atlantic City that the mayor hopes will raise in excess of $1 million Opened in 1984, Trump’s former casino was closed in 2014 and has fallen into such a state of disrepair that demolition work began earlier this year. The remainder of the structure will be dynamited on Jan. 29.

Get in line.

Marlon Blackwell Architects sues over poached casino design in Pine Bluff, Arkansas

2019-12-31T14:12:00-05:00

The Arkansas-based architect is undergoing a court case regarding his work and designs for the Saracen Resort Casino in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Blackwell filed a suit against HBG Design, Saracen Development and John Berrey, chairman of the Quapaw tribe’s business committee.

A distinguished architect who recently won the AIA's highest honor for his work earlier this month claims that his designs were "stolen." According to a recent report from the Arkansas Times the lawsuit explains, "the agreement wasn’t honored and Blackwell’s copyrighted designs were “stolen” for use on the project and Blackwell wasn’t paid. The suit says further that HBG had “poisoned” the Blackwell firm’s relationship with the Quapaw tribe and Blackwell had been removed from the project."

Max Brantley, of the Arkansas Times, was able to receive a prepared statement from John Berrey, chairman of the Quapaw tribe's business committee.

"We think that Mr. Blackwell is a very talented boutique architect. But function...

Brian Rose documents the vestiges of Trump's Atlantic City

2019-04-19T15:51:00-04:00

When Donald Trump opened the towering Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City in March 1990, he declared it “the eighth wonder of the world” and joined in the celebrations at a launch ceremony filled with portly actors dressed as genies brandishing tacky golden lamps. When photographer Brian Rose arrived in the city in 2016, the bankrupt Taj was practically empty. His images of the building’s exterior look eerily quiet, as if all its workers had left in a sudden hurry...

New Jersey's Atlantic City has rarely risen to the ranks of glitz and glamor attributed to other gambling cities. "The difference between Las Vegas and Atlantic City," the comedian Drew Carey said, "is the difference between getting conned by a beautiful call girl and getting mugged by a crack head."

Atlantic City’s former Revel casino. Photograph: Brian Rose

The photographs recently presented of the city by Brian Rose confirm this identity through an emphasis on the monumental failure of Donald Trump Taj Mahal Casino and other blights in its short history. Of Rose's photograph of the now abandoned building, The Guadian's Thomas Hobbs writes that "[its] exterior look[s] eerily quiet, as if all its workers had left in a sudden hurry, with what was once a thriving casino now unkempt and surrounded by damaged sand dunes."

Taj Mahal Elephant, sculpted by Michael MacLeod. Photo by Brian Rose.

After photographing the city in 2016, Rose has reflected on its current condition as a metaphor f...

Donald Trump, usher of America's postindustrial urban blight

2016-08-05T18:10:00-04:00

Casinos like the Taj Mahal have destroyed Atlantic City’s public space. Gambling’s arrival replaced the outward-looking hotels, shops, and promenades of the mid-century boardwalk with clusters of dark, labyrinthine resorts, set back from the street and enclosed behind monitored security gates. [...] Atlantic City’s model of a plush, self-contained casino abutting a ruined neighborhood has become a synecdoche for the last forty years of American urban development.

To dissect the urban effects of Trump's Atlantic City casino, Sam Wetherall traces the city's history as a booming resort town through the early 20th century, and into its current economic crisis:

In 2014 alone, casino closures cost Atlantic City more than ten thousand jobs, a staggering figure for a city with a population under forty thousand. Atlantic City’s unemployment rate sits at almost 14 percent, and it suffers from the highest home foreclosure rates in the country.

Donald Trump may herald a radical new force in American politics, but his background illuminates trends that have been unfolding in American cities for more than fifty years. As deindustrialization hollowed out cities’ economies, many have responded by wrapping their public spaces in glittering property developments and legalizing gambling to survive.

Atlantic City provides a potent, and foreboding, example of the kind of urbanity that Trump's business agenda has wrought:

While the media has dissected the failures of...

Movie-themed resort in Macau to show off "figure-8" ferris wheel

2015-07-16T04:20:00-04:00

The Golden Reel will be the 'centerpiece attraction' of the soon-to-[be]-opened Studio City resort. It will be located between the hotel's two central towers, 427 ft off the ground. The movie-inspired design is said to be based on the idea of two flaming asteroids crashed through the building, leaving two large holes around which the figure-eight shape is made.

Your call, Vegas.

Learning from Las Vegas: a look at the Strip through urban planning lenses

2015-02-10T14:07:00-05:00

Al describes CityCenter as the product of “the Bilbao effect: the notion that buildings designed by celebrity architects bring in tourists, and in particular a higher-end type of visitor”. MGM’s version was to bring in name-brand architects such as Daniel Libeskind, Helmut Jahn and Norman Foster [...]. “It goes against the casino design convention,” Al says, “by having towers that let in natural light and meet the street the way buildings do in other cities” – with retail spaces, not gaming.

Court Approves Demolition of Foster + Partners' Harmon Hotel in Vegas

2014-05-07T12:10:00-04:00

Foster + Partners’ Harmon Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip is being razed without ever opening. Owner MGM Resorts International received court approval on April 22 to demolish the unfinished 27-floor, oval-shaped tower following a protracted legal battle with its contractor, Tutor Perini Corp., over building defects.

How Roger Thomas Redesigned Las Vegas

2012-03-19T11:29:00-04:00

Wynn’s hotels are famous for having brought a luxurious, five-star approach to Vegas. But their real achievement may be psychological: they have remade the architecture of gaming itself. The received wisdom of modern casino design was codified by a former gambling addict named Bill Friedman in his book “Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition.”

Jonah Lehrer pens a piece in this week’s issue of the New Yorker, in which he visits Roger Thomas, the head of design at Wynn Resorts, who has revolutionized casino design in Las Vegas.