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hen art is invited to a casino, only the dutch Rem Koolhas, trendiest architect of the moment, Pritzker price 2000, who be asked to design the place. And nowhere else than the incredible Venetian Resort Hotel Casino, perfectly designed as the most famous monuments of Venice, and aim becoming soon the largest hotel of the world with step less than 6000 suites, 35 stages, 5 swimming pools, 2 casinos, 150 stores, 2500 slot machines and the greatest US conference center. And naturally, to create two museums in the Venetian, Sheldon Adelson, the owner, deals with Thomas Krens, director of Solomon R. Guggenheim foundation, in charge of the satellites of Guggenheim Museum of New York (Berlin, SoHo, Bilbao).
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The most trendy architect
And the most provocative too: the most amazing casino design, one of the most famous museums of the world... Between madness and aberration, all the ingredients are gathered to give birth in February 2002, in the City of disproportion, to two controversial art places, denying, according to one, the concept of museum itself. |
The first structure, Guggenheim Las Vegas, is a gallery of almost 8300 sq. yards located in the back of the Venetian. Naturally, you can reache it only after having crossed the gigantic and noised slot machines hall. Kind of two levels box, this industrial designed place is extremely flexible to allow wide-ranging installations and scenographies for exhibitions of painting, design and architecture, video and so on. Witness the opening successful exhibition "the art of motorbike", primary settled in Guggenheim New York, for which Frank Gehry (architect of Guggenheim Bilbao) created an architecture inside Rem Koolhas's itself.
The second place, more modest sized (approximately 950 sq. yards) and located directly in the lobby, is conceived to exhibit a selection of about fifty master pieces of Guggenheim Museum New York and Hermitage Museum of St Petersbourg, organised in two different exhibitions in the year. Here, collaboration between an American and a Russian museum among most prestigious of the world is probably not the ultimate improbable association in this art adventure, lost in the City of game insulated in the middle of Nevada desert.
Rem Koolhas chose sobriety for the design not to give the priority to architecture instead of what is given to see, as one often blame to the last museum conceptions, like Frank Gehry's one in Bilbao. Using of an almost single material, Horn-Ten steel with rusted aspect but nevertheless very smart, inside but also outside reinforces this impression of sobriety. The bias of austerity which offers a rough but refined architecture seemed necessary to face the exuberant architecture of The Venetian with its place St Marc, its bridges of the Sighs and Rialto , and its 480 sq. yards of channels built under a vault recreating an artificial sky that about 3000 tamed pigeons fly over.
By the choice of this industrial design in real contrast with the surrounding context, spaces of exposure set apart from this spirit of fair that dominates this pastiche of Venice, and been considered with the serious given to classic preservation places. However, recalling "Vegas esthetic", the architect has ornament the retractable glass cupola of Guggenheim Las Vegas with a copy of the famous Michelangelo fresco of the Sistine Chapel, in Vatican.
To open art to a larger audience
To those who desperately and ostentatiously declare wanting to open art to a larger audience, it's done. Art in Las Vegas , nothing better to serve this laudable intention!
Las Vegas is certainly not the symbol of culture, but it has the good taste not to aspire to. If Las Vegas appropriate one after the other every historical and urban icons of the world, from Middle Ages to XXIth century, from pyramids to the Eiffel Tower , this will to show greatest architectural creations through the ages doesn't have educational purpose. Nobody's mistaken, it is not a question there of true pyramids, not more than of a history or geography lesson for ignorant. What Las Vegas offers is an uninterrupted show of a fantasy, seductive and dreaming world.
Here as in a museum, nothing is to be sold. That treasure exhibited in museum or casino architecture is the American dream, the American dream which does not promise Jackpot but the possibility to dream and hope so.
Sandrine Tinturier - © 2002
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