Stefan Al
254 pp.; The MIT Press, 2017
As an operator, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wondered what the architect was thinking (or smoking) when they placed a certain feature in a certain spot. Just for starters, why in the Devil was the cage located in the worst possible location (at least from the slot team’s prospective)? In that sentence, you can substitute cage for bar, vault, TDR, the time clocks, or a good few dozen other things with an equal amount of frustration. Don’t they ever ask the folks who actually work on the floor where things should be?
(This book has nothing to do with any of that, but I just had to get it out of my system.)
Stefan Al’s The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream is a book well worth reading, however, and it should be on your shelf if you want to understand how casino architecture has evolved and how it reflects our culture, both past and present. And it’s relevant even if you’ve never been to Vegas. I’m often amused when Native American owners say things like “we didn’t want our casino to look like Las Vegas,” without really understanding that their ‘non-Las Vegas’ designs are actually concepts pioneered on the Strip.
Author Stefan Al is a Dutch architect and urban designer. He’s also an Associate Professor of Urban Design at the University of Pennsylvania. (I’m pretty certain that he’s not the one responsible for all the issues I mentioned above, so you’re free to read this without any malice aforethought.)
The views and assertions Al presents throughout this well-illustrated book are thought-provoking. “Conventional wisdom holds that Las Vegas is deviant and the Strip a display of architectural freaks. But a closer look shows that the city is more representative of American architectural trends than we would like to admit.” He’s not alone in thinking this. National market researchers test their products in Sin City first because, despite its reputation, the city is, essentially, an amalgam of America, both good and bad.
Near the end of this book, Al says, “Thanks to its fusion of urban gambling, retail, entertainment and contemporary architecture, the Las Vegas Strip has become highly successful in attracting urban sophisticates to the city – so successful that the city even became a global urban development model.”
The inside cover of this book has a most interesting graphic of the city’s design history, ranging from the El Rancho in 1941 to The Cosmopolitan in 2010. But I think it’s the insightful chapter titles that Al created that reflect our changing casino styles: Wild West; Sunbelt Modern; Pop City; Corporate Modern; Disneyland; Sim City; Starchitecture.
Perhaps his best line is “If any city deserves the ‘Makeover Award’ for the most drastic changes to its image, it is Las Vegas.” Indeed, the chapter called Disneyland reflects how quickly Las Vegas can correct a mistake. The city went from an emphasis on family attractions to “what happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas” in the virtual blink of an eye. And who doesn’t like to recount the story of how the designers of the MGM Grand didn’t really understand that Asian high rollers weren’t interested in walking into the mouth of a giant gold lion?
While this book doesn’t expound on how to make casino floors more productive, I highly recommend it nevertheless. Unfortunately, there’s not much literature out there on that topic, except for the excellent but somewhat dated Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition by Bill Friedman. That 2000 publication is the largest and heaviest book in my collection, and, while it’s probably too expensive at $150 – mine was a gift!), but hopefully, it is still on every architect’s desk (Bill knew where to put the Cages).
The Strip – Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream runs $33.60 on B&N, $28 on Amazon, or $19.24 for the Kindle edition. In my opinion, the graphics and illustrations make the hardcover a better investment than the ebook. And, while it’s not as large as the category generally indicates, the book is slightly oversized and heavily illustrated. I could see it making a great holiday gift for the coffee table.
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