There are few urban environments where the lighting is as brash and in-your-face as the Las Vegas Strip, as Philadelphia architect Denise Scott Brown has famously observed (see page 74). Getting a building noticed amid the area’s flashing neon lights and digital screens without shouting just as loud would seem almost impossible. But that is what the lighting designers set out to do at CityCenter, the Strip’s new $8.5 billion mixed-use complex.
The centerpiece of the complex, the Pelli Clarke Pelli—designed Aria Resort & Casino, arguably makes the boldest lighting statement of any of the CityCenter projects. At more than 6 million square feet, it is the development’s largest structure and the only one with a definitive crown. Each of the hotel’s primary wings, a pair of curved glass-clad towers that form intersecting arcs in plan, has an approximately 40-foot-tall series of horizontal, 14-foot-long, finlike aluminum louvers that conceal elevator overruns and other equipment. As part of the lighting scheme by Brandston Partnership, this Modernist cornice is illuminated with asymmetrical fluorescent uplights mounted at the end of each fin. The location of the fixture makes one end of the fin brighter than the other, reinforcing the rhythm of the architecture.
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