urban border zones: reappropriating " LAS VEGAS ": site + program

SITE > CITYWIDE ACCESS

The site is a half-mile west of The Strip, bordered to the east by the back-sides of casinos and malls and to the west by I-15 and old industrial buildings, the back-side of the city.

By positioning the project in this residual space between various images and communities of Las Vegas, it becomes a zone of access both for the greater city and for The Strip. It also allows the project to be positioned in the “in-between” zone of an unresolved but potentially urban condition.

This could be considered one of many interventions, one moment in an archipelago of new spaces for Las Vegas that work together to create new community space. This location in particular offers connectivity to a wide range of resources in the city, both physically and socially, due to its “centrality.” The threshold between visitor destination and residential city in particular provides fertile ground for intensifying relationships in a tectonic setting.

PROGRAM > REVEALING PROCESS

The program for the site overall is a civic space for multiple user groups. Specifically, this will be accomplished through the intersection of two typologies:

casino and community dance center.

CASINO

Given that this is an exceptional and iconic type of bracketed space in Las Vegas, the casino border will be the starting ground for a unique tectonic and temporal strategy of place-making.

DANCE CENTER

A community dance center will be the main design focus, as this will be the “border program.” Working with the new Smith Center, soon to be the home of the Nevada Ballet and Philharmonic, a more community-oriented center can provide an ancillary space for rehearsal and performance but moreover for the involvement of community activities with more formalized practices. In terms of arts education, the center will provide a full range of body-learning activities, including step dance, youth dance, parkour, yoga, and so forth, in addition to more typical offerings. The main purpose of the design will be to foreground process and activity in as many ways as possible to add a new experience to that of public Las Vegas.

thesis in brief

Now, at a moment when massive urbanization is spreading around the globe, and in an era during which our relationships to physical space as well as to one another are being continuously reconfigured by technology and mobility, architecture must interrogate the role of urban environments in fostering sustained interaction, confrontation, and innovation by reconsidering the design of civic space.

Architecture is most challenged by the exclusionary nature of the city and the fact that global markets and networks have interiorized nearly every aspect of contemporary society, which as a result relies heavily on the strength of boundaries and images for defining identity and as such resists most truly democratic formations.

Taking advantage of the ongoing urban process of making and remaking boundaries as images in and of the city are constantly reappropriated and transformed, architecture can use these tools to employ new strategies for establishing common ground and forging connections that will resonate with and empower the public citizen.

bibliography

URBAN ENVIRONMENTS AND POLITICAL INTERACTION

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Winter 2008. p 91-119.

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propinquity. ed. Joan Copjec and Michael Sorkin. London: Verso, 1999.

Easterling, Keller. Enduring innocence: global architecture and its political masquerades. Cambridge: MIT Press,

2005.

Friedmann, John. “Transnational Migration: Spaces of Incorporation.” The Prospect of Cities. 2002. p 39-65.

Future City. ed. Stephen Read, Jurgen Rosemann, and Job van Eldijk. London: Spon Press, 2005.

Harvey, David. Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.

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University of Texas Press, 2006.

Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Tafuri, Manfredo. “Reason’s Adventures: Naturalism and the City in the Century of the Enlightenment,”

Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1980.

Visualizing the City. ed. Alan Marcus and Dietrich Neumann. London: Routledge, 2007.

Webber, Melvin. “The Urban Place and the Non-Place Urban Realm.” Exploration into Urban Structure. 1964.

EXPERIENCE ECONOMY

Architourism: authentic, escapist, exotic, spectacular. ed. Joan Ockman and Salomon Frausto. Munich: Prestel,

2005.

Cass, Jeffrey. “Egypt on Steroids: Luxor Las Vegas and Postmodern Orientalism.” Architecture and Tourism:

Perception, Performance, and Place. ed. D. Medina Lasansky and Brian McLaren. Oxford: Berg, 2004.

p 241-263.

Easterling, Keller. “Only the Many.” Log 11. Winter 2008. p 143-151.

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Design, 1998.

Lowenthal, David. “The Past as Theme Park.” Theme Park Landscapes: Antecedents and Variations. ed. Terence

Young and Robert Riley. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2002.

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Variations on a theme park: the new American city and the end of public space. ed. Michael Sorkin. New York:

Hill and Wang, 1992.

REPRESENTATION AND SUBJECTIVITY

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Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

Koolhaas, Rem and Bruce Mau. S, M, L, XL: Office for Metropolitan Architecture. ed. Jennifer Sigler. New York:

Monacelli Press, 1995.

Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960.

Mau, Bruce with Jennifer Leonard and the Institute Without Boundaries. Massive Change. London: Phaidon, 2004.

DANCE

Armstrong, Leslie and Roger Morgan. Space for Dance: An Architectural Design Guide. New York: Pub. Center for

Cultural Resources, 1984.

Chapman, John. “The Aesthetic Interpretation of Dance History.” Dance Chronicle. Vol. 3, No. 3. 1979-1980,

p 271.

Gill, Jerry H. “On Knowing the Dancer from the Dance.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Vol. 34,

No. 2. Winter 1975. p 125-135.

Hanna, Judith Lynne. “The Mentality and Matter of Dance.” Art Education. March 1983.

Kealiinohomoku, Joann W. “Myth and Ritual in Time and Space.” Dance Research Journal. Vol. 29, No. 1.

Spring 1997. p 65-72.

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p 37-42.

Sparshott, Francis. “The Future of Dance Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Vol. 51, No. 2.

Spring 1993. p 227-234.

LAS VEGAS

Davis, Mike. “The Strip Versus Nature.” Metropolis Now. ed. Ramesh Kumar. 2000, p 100-110.

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Winter/Spring 1998. p 1-5.

Las Vegas: An Unconventional History. ed. Michelle Farrari and Stephen Ives. New York: Bulfinch Press, 2005.

Stripping Las Vegas: A Contextual Review of Casino Resort Architecture. ed. Karin Jaschke and Silke Otsch. 2002.

Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas: the forgotten symbolism of

architectural form. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977.

DATA SOURCES

Las Vegas Government website.

CityCenter website.

“Las Vegas issue.” Urban Land. September 2007.

“Reurbanizing the core.” Urban Land. April 2005, p 105-118.

Union Park website.

Vegas Today and Tomorrow website.

urban border zones: reappropriating " LAS VEGAS "

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