Las Vegas: CityCenter’s Lighting designers favor form over flash

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The illumination strategy depended on emphasizing the unique qualities of each structure.

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.

To create the mega-development, which is dense and vertical in a city where spread out and horizontal rule, MGM Resorts International (formerly MGM Mirage), owner of CityCenter with Dubai-based development partner Infinity World, hired a group of high-profile architects including Daniel Libeskind, Pelli Clarke Pelli, and Kohn Pedersen Fox, in the hopes that urbanism and high design would woo visitors from flashier hotels and casinos elsewhere on the Strip. Lighting these architects’ buildings did not involve throwing as many watts at the facades as possible, as would be typical in Las Vegas. Instead, the illumination strategy depended on emphasizing the unique qualities of each structure, says Kelly Stechschulte, project director for Illuminating Concepts. The company was the project’s executive lighting designer, responsible for coordinating 16 other firms working on the exterior and interior lighting.

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