Can the raw design of the Guggenheims mesh with Strip fantasia to give us a museum peace?

Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2001 | 11 a.m.

Pondering the advent of the Venetian's double-barreled Guggenheims (and can we go ahead and submit to linguistic inevitability and begin calling them "the Googs" now?), one can't help but ask: What are museums--particularly in the context of the Las Vegas Strip--supposed to be?

As designed by acclaimed Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, the massive Guggenheim Las Vegas (to open in the summer) and the compact Guggenheim-Hermitage (spring) would appear to be this: anti-casinos. Consider the 8,000-square-foot smaller facility--a partnership between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Russia's Hermitage Museum--which will be built, inside and out, of rusted steel and sited next to the resort's main entrance.

Anti-casino? It's practically anti-architecture, at least as that term is understood on the Strip in its Late Megaresort Age.

"The use of raw steel conforms to a long-held Modernist belief that buildings should be an expression of their era," Los Angeles Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote when the designs were unveiled last fall. "The gallery will not be disguised under layers of ornamentation. Its raw beauty reminds us that we live in a postindustrial age, not Renaissance or Baroque Venice."

The larger museum, while it won't be visible from the street, will also be utterly unlike anything else in the neighborhood. With its 70-foot ceilings and a ceiling-mounted crane--not to mention a trench (with a removable transparent covering) running the length of the floor--Koolhaas, winner of the 2000 Pritzker Prize, has designed a space more akin to a hangar than the gilded temple of art most surely expected. "In effect, the building is a vast machine for transporting and viewing art," Ouroussoff wrote.

A rusty steel box and a giant industrial shed inset in the fantasy architecture of the Venetian--and, by extension, the fantasy architecture of Las Vegas Boulevard--will certainly strike a discordant note. (That's not out of character for the Guggenheim; these facilities will be the latest in a line of distinctive museums that includes Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral Guggenheim in New York, and Frank Gehry's biomorphous, titanium-skinned Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain.) Will the Googs repudiate or complement the prevailing approach to architecture that has made Las Vegas a design icon?

"Will it be a blot on the Strip? I would say no," says UNLV art historian Robert Tracy. "It will be different, and that fact alone will be controversial; some could conclude that it's a blot on the Strip because it's so different. But that is also the structure's strength. ... I think it is healthy to the life of museums to be risk-takers rather than stagnant morgues." In fact, he sees Koolhassian style infiltrating the Strip. "I can see the proposed monorail system, with its various stations, picking up on the Koolhaas design," he says.

"Koolhaas' art machine is meant as an alternative to Las Vegas' own machinery of seduction," Ouroussoff wrote. "It is a courageous act."

But is it a lasting one? This city, after all, has smoothly incorporated a black-glass pyramid, a Disney-esque castle, a fake skyline and a pipsqueak Eiffel Tower into one all-inclusive Vegaesthetic. Can the Googs maintain their autonomy in such a co-optive atmosphere, or will they eventually become just another megaresort come-on?

"There will be those who say [the museums] are nothing more than upscale casino greeters," Tracy concludes. "But history will prove these skeptics wrong."

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