Architectural Enigma

Anne Hosier

Monday, Oct. 20, 1997 | 9:56 a.m.

All anyone really needed to know about architecture in Las Vegas could once be gleaned by standing on a bluff overlooking the valley:

The Strip, one of the undisputed architectural wonders of the world, jutted up like a sparkling dorsal fin in a sea of red-tiled roofs covering an endless series of bland, vanilla-colored tract houses.

And that was it.

There were few real civic areas, no major art museums and hardly a downtown to speak of. Most of the housing that was going up appeared to have come off a Xerox machine. And everything, in the words of Dr. Keith Eggener, an assistant professor in architectural history at UNLV, appeared to have "been built last week."

So when a group of Las Vegas architects stood up to defend their community at a crowded gathering of architectural professionals several years ago, where there was considerable gushing about the virtues of the Strip, James Russell, a senior managing editor at "Architectural Record" magazine in New York, was somewhat skeptical.

"(They) said 'You know, Las Vegas is about something besides the Strip,' " Russell remembers. "And I didn't say this at the time, but I wanted to get up and say 'Prove it.' "

Russell had driven around the valley and seen mostly a vast suburban sprawl.

"People didn't express other aspects of their lives in architecture."

Russell now says that has changed to some extent in recent years.

Several new libraries and cultural centers have opened, giving Las Vegans not only some architecturally acclaimed buildings to call their own, but much-needed civic space. Shades of blue, orange and purple have appeared in small patches on the landscape as designers gradually begin to incorporate color into their building materials. The design of the new county building has prompted some speculation about the beginnings of a Las Vegas architectural style. And some efforts have been made to resolve the fragmentation so characteristic of the city.

But as local architects, builders, planners and officials celebrate the state's first "Architecture Week" -- which started Sunday and runs through Friday -- the debate continues over how far Las Vegas has come in urban planning and architecture, and how far we still have to go.

Victory of design

Rising like a mountain of burnished sandstone in a section of land between the Union Pacific railroad tracks and the spaghetti bowl, the Clark County Government Center illustrates both the recent improvements in architecture and problems that persist in our urban planning -- or lack thereof.

By most architects' accounts (at least the ones interviewed for this story) the county center is a nicely designed building, featuring colors and materials that are appropriate to its desert surroundings. There are elements of Pueblo architecture, an acknowledgement of native Southwestern building traditions, says architect Alan Hess, an architectural critic for the San Jose Mercury News and author of the book "Viva Las Vegas: After Hours Architecture." And the shapes reflect those found in the Valley of Fire, which provided inspiration for the design, according to Eric Strain, a local architect and adjunct professor at the UNLV School of Architecture.

"That's a work of architecture and one of the first the city has," Russell says of the county building. "You have some real architecture emerging."

"There are pieces of that project that are quite nice," Strain agrees. "The use of the amphitheater as a cooling device that allows the grass to emit a lower temperature (that is) brought into the main hall."

But the most often-voiced complaint about the building is its location -- isolated in a no-man's land from downtown and all other government buildings. "It really is kind of an island in and of itself," Strain says.

And that sort of physical fragmentation is a problem that extends not only to the government sector, but to the artistic community and beyond. For example, there is no a single area where locals came come to pay their traffic tickets, register to vote and attend a planning commission meeting. Nor is there one particular neighborhood that has attracted a concentration of art galleries -- often the key to neighborhood redevelopment. "Right now we have artists' studios strung out all over town," Strain says.

With the opening of the "Art Factory," an old warehouse near Charleston, and the Casino Center recently converted into artist studios and galleries, some think that situation will soon change. "Hopefully that area can develop into an artists' core," Strain says.

And among government officials, there has been talk of creating "a judicial core" by linking the new federal courts building, the expanded jails, and other justice facilities together with a large pedestrian mall, Strain says. "If they were able to do that and provide those kinds of amenities, you would start seeing office buildings and restaurants opening between those."

Still, Las Vegas continues to be plagued by its physical sprawl, and its lack of what Eggener calls "an old urban core." There is little sense of cohesion, urban density, or what Jan Becker, a professor at the UNLV School of Architecture calls "a sense of place."

"Everything in Las Vegas is so disconnected," she says. "I would like to see Las Vegas developed as a more urban place, with neighborhoods."

Built for a purpose

Becker, for one, would like to see less emphasis on creating buildings that are superficially pretty or sculptural -- and fail to mesh with their surroundings -- and more effort on building spaces that meet the community's needs. "Buildings need to have a relationship to each other and to the street, and to form places." For the most part, the architecture in Las Vegas "doesn't speak to me or give me any sense of place, or neighborhood, or character," she says.

"Architecture cannot be judged from an aesthetic point of view. It has a much more functional and human purpose to it."

One of those purposes is to create a place for public interaction, a physical center for the community like the traditional town square. And civic areas and plazas that are truly open to the public remain sorely lacking in the valley.

"Hotels and the Strip aren't really public space," Eggener says. "You can go into a hotel if you behave yourself in certain ways, and follow the dress code, such as it is, but you still can't go into the lobby of the Monte Carlo and set up a soapbox and start ranting about some political viewpoint you want to get across."

However, most architectural critics agree that the new buildings constructed by the library district -- controversial for their cost (the Sahara West Library and Fine Arts Museum alone cost approximately $13 million) -- have gone a long way toward fulfilling the need for civic space. In fact, Richard Beckman, associate professor of architecture at UNLV, calls the library program that built the new spaces "one of the most far-reaching and significant architectural programs in the country.

"They've been enormously successful with the community," Beckman says. "I'm amazed at the usage they get. It belies the notion that there is no culture in Las Vegas."

Both inside and out, many of these buildings -- including the Las Vegas Library & District Headquarters, which architects fondly refer to as the "Predock Library" after Antoine Predock, the New Mexico-based architect who designed it, the Whitney Library, the Summerlin Library and Performing Arts Center and the West Sahara Library -- were designed to stimulate community interaction.

And for the most part they've done a good job fulfilling that role.

Though many taxpayers still grumble about the cost of the buildings, and the fact that the money was diverted from books, many architects believe their value to the community will become apparent over the long run.

"Libraries all over America are much more important social centers than they used to be," Russell says. "These are the kind of things that become the building blocks for a city that's about something besides the Strip."

Cars and convenience

For the most part these shining examples of civic architecture still exist within neighborhoods that aren't winning any awards for design innovation.

This is partly because the demand for housing and schools is so pressing that huge projects, many based on prototypes, are going up in a flurry without much consideration of design or site. And our obsession with convenience has spawned a huge, congested urban sprawl in which it's virtually impossible to get around without a car.

"It's like any other Southwestern city," Beckman says. "Miles and miles of red-tiled roofs and gated communities, too-wide streets, and strip malls."

However, as the valley attracts residents from across the country and the world, housing design is starting to diversify a bit. "Over the last five years the work in this town has improved greatly," Strain says. "We're getting a mass that's allowing designers more freedom. We're having people come in from other areas of the country so they're bringing in their sensibilities from all over."

Still, the extent to which urban planners cater to the automobile culture is something that continues to be a pressing issue. Becker and many other local architects would like to see us "move beyond the car and look at the human being as the driving force behind design."

Saluting the Strip

There is no getting around the Strip's position, figuratively and literally, as the main architectural attraction in town. Beckman says he can think of at least two dozen books currently being written by architects throughout the country on the glittering, neon boulevard. "To me it's one of the most exciting urban environments in the country," he says.

"I like almost anything on the Strip better than 99 percent of the strip malls that surround it," Eggener says.

According to Russell, a debate nevertheless persists among architects as to whether these themed casinos -- which often imitate real styles of building -- are actually architecture in their own right. "The kind of stage-set quality of what you see, and the (fact) that what's on the outside doesn't necessarily reflect what's on the inside, this sort of makes architects recoil in horror," he says.

But it's a short-lived horror, and architects can't seem to keep themselves from gawking in admiration at megaresorts like New York-New York and the Luxor.

As alarming as it may seem to the rest of us, many architects now view the Strip as a shining example of suburban planning. Whether by accident or by design, many Strip megaresorts have managed to bring all the elements of suburban living -- housing, public space, outdoor areas, high- and low-rise elements -- into a single area and make them work in a way that's unique and unprecedented, Hess says.

"The surrounding areas," he adds, "certainly could learn something from the Strip."

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