Archinect - News

Take a look inside the Las Vegas Sphere's interior and lighting designs

2023-12-22T14:05:00-05:00

New York-based design studio ICRAVE has shared a special look inside its interior, wayfinding, and lighting design work on the headline-grabbing new Sphere entertainment venue in Las Vegas.

Besides its 580,000-square-foot fully programmable exterior LED facade and the 160,000-square interior display for 17,500 guests, Sphere features another 300,000 square feet of interior space spread across eight levels.

Cross section rendering of Sphere. Image courtesy Sphere Entertainment

The lighting strategy for its lobby, VIP clubs, food and beverage spaces, and other hospitality suites was designed to mimic the geometry of the venue (now the world’s largest spherical structure) and insists on stage lighting to further communicate its purpose to the world.

Photo: Rich Fury, courtesy Sphere Entertainment

“We needed the surrounding spaces to live up to the promise of what’s inside the bowl and to ensure...

The New Yorker dissects the immersive potential of Sphere and City

2023-11-14T08:00:00-05:00

The differences between “City” and the Sphere are deep, true, yet narrower than you might suppose—the works are trying for the same things but in opposite ways. Both are big, expensive, geometric structures in the desert that offer visitors a vivid encounter with the natural world—one with exquisite footage of jellyfish and the like, the other with deftly roughened rock and concrete.

The New Yorker’s art critic Jackson Arn takes on two of the most recent (and spectacular) cultural offerings of the Silver State — "One with a deluge of images and the other with a tantalizing lack of them," as he writes.

Related on Archinect: Take a look at photos of Michael Heizer's 'City' ahead of its debut (45°, 90°, 180°, City. © Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Joe Rome)

The Sunset Strip may get a mini Las Vegas Sphere-ish display

2023-11-09T17:45:00-05:00

A new spherical LED billboard display appears ready to grace Los Angeles’ Sunset Boulevard as planners are preparing to review a developer proposal for "The Sphere on Sunset" entertainment venue in West Hollywood.

Urbanize LA was first to report on the Las Vegas Sphere-like structure before it goes up for review in front of the West Hollywood Planning Commission's Design Review Subcommittee today (November 9).

The project would culminate at 8410 Sunset Boulevard. Its brief calls for the demolition of an existing café at the site, an outdoor video display, and construction of a 49-foot wide sphere and a 2,460-square-foot building to be used partially for podcast production. A new 2,400-square-foot pedestrian plaza and 1,350-square-foot roof terrace/viewing platform will be enacted as well. Los Angeles’ SAEE Studio is listed as the architect.

Image courtesy SAEE Studio

The project hopes to follow in the 516-foot-wide footsteps of the wildly successful Las Vegas Sphere, which has drawn...

Learning from Las Vegas’ new Sphere as it shines a light on the future of entertainment design

2023-10-02T15:24:00-04:00

The buzz that followed the recent debut of Populous' $2.3 billion Sphere in Las Vegas has provided one academic at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas with a valuable teaching opportunity to expose students to cutting-edge concepts integral to the future of high-tech spatial experience, urban development, and entertainment design.

“I’m excited to see some of my own students in the master of architecture program, have played a role in things like commissioning of the Sphere as part of their internships, looking at the building system performance,” Associate Professor of Architecture Glenn NP Nowak told the local affiliate KLAS-TV recently. “We have looked at the integration of digital technology, obviously it’s paramount when looking at that, it’s impossible to ignore and it shows that evolution we’ve seen throughout the Strip.”

Nowak serves as the founding director of the UNLV School o...

Refik Anadol previews new AI data sculpture installation for Las Vegas Sphere

2023-08-31T17:54:00-04:00

A new AI Data Sculpture installation from Refik Anadol has been unveiled ahead of its public premiere tomorrow, September 1st, at the newly-complete Sphere entertainment venue in Las Vegas.

The sculpture utilizes the structure’s Exosphere, a digital canvas covering that can be programmed to display content thanks to its world-leading array of 1.2 million different LED ‘pucks’ which are spaced 8 inches apart to form an almost 580,000-square-foot display.

Anadol says: “It’s so exciting to be given such an architectural and engineering marvel as a canvas. This opportunity aligns perfectly with our studio’s long-term mission of embedding media arts into architecture to create living architectural pieces that are in constant interaction with their environments.”

Rendering courtesy Refik Anadol Studio

The latest in his Machine Hallucinations series will offer viewers a meditative and elaborate multisensory experience based on accumulated local atmospheric data that are consolidated and th...

Watch Las Vegas’ MSG Sphere light up for Fourth of July debut

2023-07-05T18:11:00-04:00

At 366 feet tall and 516 feet wide, it’s being billed as the world’s largest spherical structure. Its bowl-shaped theater reportedly contains the world’s highest-resolution wraparound LED screen. And its exterior is fitted with 1.2 million hockey puck-sized LEDs that can be programmed to flash dynamic imagery on a massive scale – again, reportedly the world’s largest. It was fully illuminated for the first time Tuesday night to celebrate the Fourth of July.

The venue doesn’t officially debut until late September with the beginning of U2’s special residency. The sphere will blast tunes from its hyper-customizable 164,000-speaker audio system, which somehow can even direct specific languages to certain parts of the audience.

Video courtesy of Sphere/YouTube

Testing of its eye-burning extierior didn’t commence until just last week. In a press statement, Sphere Entertainment SVP Guy Barnett called it “living architecture, and unlike anything that exists anywhere in the world.”

London MSG concert venue confirmed; new Sphere designs unveiled for Las Vegas

2018-02-09T16:08:00-05:00

The Madison Square Garden Company (MSG) confirmed on Friday that it wants to build the Sphere, a glazed orb with up to 18,000 seats and room for 5,000 standing, beside the Olympic Park in east London. Designs of a similar “sphere” planned for Las Vegas suggest that the vault of the roof will become a giant screen for vast projections, which could evoke the sensation of being underwater or in a forest.

Rumors about a monumental sphere-shaped music venue proposal for London seem to be gaining substance: The Guardian reports that the New York-based Madison Square Garden Company confirmed its plans to build a glazed orb — designed by Populous — for over 20,000 concert goers near the Olympic Park.

This interior rendering of Sphere Las Vegas suggests the capabilities of the dome's projection screens. Image: The Madison Square Garden Company

MSG also just revealed designs for a similar venue in Las Vegas, called Sphere, which will already break ground later this near the Venetian and Palazzo complex. The surface of Sphere reportedly boasts 190,000 linear feet of LED lighting on the exterior and 180,000 square feet of high-resolution screens on the interior, turning it into a giant, domed 360-degree screen for image and video projections, depending on the needs for each event that is being hosted.