Designers of a Heterotopic Las VegasThemed spaces, the politics of representation,and unintentional interstices

RJ Sakai12.12.10Deterritorialized SpacesLorne Falk

“To live in this pluralistic world means to

experience freedom as a continual oscillation

between belonging and disorientation.”

– Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 10.

There is only one place in the world where one can stroll the cobblestone pathways of the ancient

Roman Empire and be sandwiched between the brands and logos of Gucci, Tiffany & Co.,

Abercrombie & Fitch, and Victoria’s Secret. Nowhere else can one bask in an air-conditioned

pyramid situated in the middle of the desert. Nowhere else can one pay $56.95 to eat with their

hands and watch as, right before their eyes, kings and knights from all over the world battle to

the death. Nowhere else would one encounter un poliziotto, dressed in a traditional Italian police

uniform along the canals of Venice who would be able to answer your questions only in perfect,

un-accented English. It is precisely this balance of the familiar and the exotic—belonging and

disorientation—for which all tourists flock to Las Vegas.

Here, I explore how designers’ efforts to create authentic, evocative and homogenous

themed spaces in Las Vegas form heterotopias. I explain why given the nature of Las Vegas, it

is difficult to problematize the fact that a select few people have been put in charge of forming

the experience people have with their built environment since collectively and inadvertently, the

spaces form a distinctly heterogenous heterotopia in conjunction with other unique and undeniable

phenomena unique to the city. Since the construction of themed spaces in Las Vegas was only a fad

of the 1990s, I will conclude by reconsidering what the role of space means for a contemporary Las

Vegas built on luxury instead of otherness. In addition to writings on the subject, I will draw on my

own experiences of being in Las Vegas, New York, and Venice.

I have spent every Thanksgiving in Las Vegas since 1995. No, I don’t have relatives there—

family tradition brings me. Las Vegas and I have grown up together. Staying no longer than a couple

2

nights, I spend my days exploring the offerings of hotels like The Excalibur, Caesar’s Palace, Paris,

The Venetian, Treasure Island, New York New York, and my childhood favorite, Circus Circus. I

never questioned the city’s uniqueness until I was old enough that people would feel comfortable

chuckling when I told them I was headed to Las Vegas for the holiday. Throughout my childhood

Las Vegas came to be a place more normal than most regard it. As I grow older, it becomes

increasingly weirder.

By weird I mean to say that the city is a bombardment of hyper-real, hygienic and selective

regurgitations of cultures. Representations of places are visually exaggerated to compensate for

their inauthenticity. They are both hygienically designed (walls painted clean, solid colors without

blemishes from weathering), and hygienically maintained (constant cleaning). In my most recent trip

I sat at the corner of Greenwich St. and Broadway in the New York, New York Hotel & Casino. In

the real New York, these streets never cross. The streets were most likely chosen by interior design

firm Yates-Silverman for their well-known names. In the hotel, these are not streets with exhaust-

3

The Grand Canals at The VenetianRJ Sakai, November, 2010

spewing garbage trucks, but rather make up the pedestrian shopping and dining area adjacent to the

casino. Feeling as though I had just walked through four different Manhattan neighborhoods, I sat

down at a table next to an expired parking meter and experienced. People pointed to the storefront

façade behind me and said, “Hey, want your dry cleaning done!” as they nudged their partners and

rolled their luggage across the cobblestone. As I walked out I noticed Times Square-like electronic

displays advertising Panasonic, Crown Royal and Pepsi-Cola. These loom above the heads of slot

machine players hoping to strike it rich. These types of heterotopic spaces are ubiquitous on The

Strip.

Based on these observations, Las Vegas hotels epitomize Foucault’s heterotopia. His

heterotopia has six characteristics1: (1) either a space of crisis or deviance with boundaries and

rules, such as prisons; (2) spaces whose functions and relationships to their surroundings transform,

such as cemeteries; (3) spaces that juxtapose incompatible places, such as theaters; (4) spaces that

perpetually accumulate items or experiences, such as museums; (5) spaces that maintain systems of

1. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” in Architecture Culture, 1943-1968, ed. Joan Ockman (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 422

4

Greenwich St. & Broadway, New York, New YorkRJ Sakai, November, 2010

closing and opening that isolate them while still making them penetrable, such as motels; (6) lastly, all

heterotopias exist “between the two poles of illusion and compensation.”2 As the hotel guests that

took delight in walking along Greenwich St. demonstrate, themed hotels serve as one of the best

examples of a heterotopia existing between the poles of illusion and compensation. In Las Vegas

tourists take in the illusion of strolling through the alleys of Venice or witnessing a fight on a pirate

ship and are compensated3 with a comfy bed, an abundance of food, the treatment of a king, and a

relaxing break from everyday life. It is the tourist’s need for the familiar and the exotic—belonging

and disorientation, compensation and illusion—that make the formation of a heterotopic space

necessary.

Given the needs the hotel architect has to address, it is only natural that heterotopias are

produced. As the designer of experiences, it is the architect’s job to create “authentic,”4 evocative,

and homogenous spaces that respond to tourists’ experiential desires. Architect of hotels such as

Caesar’s Palace, The Mirage, and Treasure Island, Joel Bergman said in an interview, “[A successful

resort is] a place where people feel comfortable and their needs are satisfied.”5 From a touristic

perspective, “needs” can be illustrated as the quest for the Other during the day while having

comfort to come home to at night. Though the exotic is different for everyone (for example, a

Parisian visiting the Paris hotel might be faced with an entirely different type of exotic than a New

Yorker would), this does not stop a search for the authentic. Addressing the need for the exotic,

designers often look toward the authentic since a foreign and authentic storefront is more exotic

2. Sarah Chaplin, “Heterotopia Deserta: Las Vegas and other spaces,” in InterSections: Architectural Histories and Critical Theories, ed. Iain Borden and Jane Rendell (New York: Routledge, 2000), 206.

3. In this sense, compensation should not imply a compensation for something, but instead simply a providing of some-thing. If anything, tourists are compensated for their money and time and effort put into vacationing in Las Vegas.

4. Authenticity refers to a particular authentic culture that has been formed in the tourist’s imaginary. The tourist’s ideal of an authentic culture is not necessarily formed by personal experiences in that culture, but usually formed by other tourists’, artists’, and media representations of that culture. Before coming to Las Vegas’s New York, tourists already have an idea of the authentic experience they seek that is based off of representations of real New York they have previously come across. Authenticity does not directly refer to any real or true culture, but instead how that culture exists authentically in the tourist imaginary.

5. Liz Benston, “Six Questions: Joel Bergman, architect of themed megaresorts,” Las Vegas Sun, October 8, 2008, ac-cessed December 7, 2010, http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/oct/08/joel-bergman/

5

than just a foreign one. Referring to The Venetian Hotel, magnate Sheldon Adelson says, “No

property anywhere in the world has been reproduced with such authenticity and in such excruciating

detail.”6 The aim to create authentic, evocative and homogenous spaces and experiences exists

throughout many microcosmic hotels in Las Vegas.

It is easy to identify how these needs are addressed when comparing the experiences of

being in Venice, Italy and being in The Venetian, Las Vegas, Nevada. The Grand Canal shopping

area of The Venetian feels like an indestructible playground where one can wander around

without the fear of getting too lost since it is enclosed and designed to lead one back to the casino.

Conversely in Venice one feels conscious of the trace they leave behind and there is a greater fear

of actually getting lost (although one is always contained by the water surrounding the island). In

The Venetian one feels a primary emphasis on consumption and a secondary emphasis on culture,

ornamentation and aesthetic. Arguably, the opposite is true in Venice. The heterotopic Venetian

experience is an imitation, but not replica, of the “real” Venice experience so as to serve the needs

of the tourist.

Taking into consideration the examples of New York, New York and The Venetian it is clear

that Las Vegas plays into the heterotopic aesthetic of ornamentation and excess. The integration of

aesthetic and representation (i.e., art) into the hotel experience is a prime example of the “radical

transformation in the relation between art and everyday life” that Vattimo notes.7 This proliferation

of images is characterized as an “explosion of the ornamental and heterotopian character of today’s

aesthetic.”8 Down to the tiniest detail, artistic decisions are made about representation; curtains

drape the windows of apartment facades in New York, New York and small, carved lion heads

spew water from their mouths at the surface of the canals that run through The Venetian. The

ornamentation of excess is what some might attribute to the creation inequalities.

6. IGWB–International Gaming and Wagering Business (March 1999), 50.

7. Gianni Vattimo “From Utopia to Heterotopia.” In The Transparent Society, trans. David Webb (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 62.

8. Ibid., 74.

6

For Vattimo, beauty and its ornamental character is what constitutes the world and

what creates elitist class distinctions—both of which some might say are present in Las Vegas’

heterotopias. Beauty is ornament because that to which it refers is an “extension of life’s world

through a process of referrals to other possible life worlds.”9 Beauty’s significance is that it calls

upon an other world that has more to offer than the present. Beauty extends boundaries through

a reciprocal process of referrals. The ornaments that are produced and reproduced through this

creation of beauty are what constitute the present world. It is at this point that Vattimo says that this

heterotopian aesthetic of ornamentation and excess is one of “mindless decoration [that] invokes

elitist class distinctions.”10 On might draw that these class distinctions manifest themselves three

ways in Las Vegas; (1) a handful of architects are responsible for the design of the The Strip; (2)

their design processes subordinate cultures and people in that they are selective in what they choose

to reproduce; (3) these reproductions contribute to the imaginaries of only those able to (and

wanting to) visit Las Vegas.

Understanding that the heterotopian aesthetic of ornamentation is invoked in the Las

Vegas experience, and that this aesthetic perhaps leads to elitist class distinctions and problems of

power, one might question and problematize the idea that one small group of people is: (1) leading

the selective and surface-level reproduction of other worlds; (2) dictating the experiences of more

than 35 million people per year have in Las Vegas, as well as the production of authentic cultures.11

Over the past three decades, architect Joel Bergman has lead the designing of nine hotels located

on The Strip. Though architects and designers work toward tourists’ ideals, it is ultimately their

own crossings with cultures (e.g., representations in the media, representations put forth by tourist

boards and ministries) upon which they call to create space. Adding to the problematizing of the

imaginaries upon which designers draw, it can be added that designers’ own particular reifications

of cultures contribute to and perpetuate reflections and regurgitations of Other worlds. With each

9. Ibid., 72

10. Chaplin, “Heterotopia Deserta,” 210.

11. As noted earlier, it is outside representations of cultures that create the authentic culture. Ironically, Las Vegas repre-sentations of cultures contribute to an authentic, while at the same time drawing on other representations.

7

successive manifestation, the way a culture is represented is pulled further and further away from

the voice of the people of that culture. This cooptation of culture is what some might argue is the

essence of elitist class distinctions in Las Vegas.

Not so fast. Before one goes on to accuse designers or the system of anything, it is essential

to understand that the authentic, homogenous and evocative spaces of heterotopic hotels form a

Las Vegas experience in conjunction with non-hotel spaces, people who are not acting under the

script of a theme, and the way people move from hotel to hotel. Some of the most crucial spaces

and relationships to take note of in order to understand Las Vegas are those that exist between the

hotels themselves. People no longer experience Las Vegas’ other cultures, instead they experience

Las Vegas culture. Non-hotel spaces make the tourist highly aware of their being in Las Vegas so

that when they enter the Paris hotel or Luxor, they know they are not in Paris or Egypt. This is not

to say that the fabricated Parisian culture, for example, ceases to contribute to the tourist’s imaginary;

only to say that the distinctly Las Vegas experience mitigates it. One’s experience is de-homogenized

as signs and a monorail usher one from hotel to hotel. I am convinced that is possible to traverse the

whole three-mile length of The Strip while only stepping outside once or twice. Making this trip one

could travel through ancient Eygpt, ancient Rome, and ancient England in a number of minutes. As

says Chaplin, “In Las Vegas, heterochronism exists in the form of a multitude of themed resorts

which borrow from other places and other times and are then juxtaposed along the Strip without

any logical historical or geographical ordering.”12 Designed spaces co-exist and interact with the

intrinsic nature of the city. One encounters numerous homeless asking for money as one cross one

of the many massive pedestrian bridges that spans Las Vegas Blvd taking you directly from one hotel

to the next. A Las Vegas experience is not so much that of distinct regurgitated cultures, but rather

the non-places that exist between them. These unscripted characters and unaccounted for spaces

disrupt the idea that the Las Vegas experience is created by select group and instead reinforces it as a

collective heterotopia that exists partly because of the heterotopia of the hotels.

12. Ibid., 207.

8

The reality of Las Vegas as a whole becomes most heterotopic because of the confluence of

“images, interpretations and reconstructions” it breeds.13 Referring again to Foucault’s definition,14

this is to say that Las Vegas itself—in addition to the individual hotels—(1) displays a juxtaposition

of different incompatible places within one space; (2) serves as a site of perpetual accumulation of

experiences; and most of all is (3) a space between illusion and compensation. The convergence

of realities (e.g., homelessness, non-hotel spaces) and imaginaries (e.g., Paris, Venice, New York)

illustrate each of these three characteristics. These aspects of the city offer a postmodern, un-

unilinear view on the world.

Drawing upon Bhabha’s ideas of time, Las Vegas plays to an idea of temporality—that

is, one that continues in all directions—instead of historicity, or one of linearity. According to

Bhabha, temporality “provides a perspective on the disjunctive forms of representation that signify

a people, a nation, or a national culture.”15 Las Vegas exists in present time but draws upon various

13. Gianni Vattimo “The Postermodern: A Transparent Society?” In The Transparent Society, trans. David Webb (Balti-more: John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 7.

14. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 422.

15. Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation: time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation, “ in Nation and Narration, ed. by Homi Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 292.

9

Mandalay Bay, Luxor, Excalibur, New York, New York, http://www.golfscorer.co.uk/RoundTheWorld2004/LasVegasPhotos.aspx

periods and ideas to create an identity that resists a cohesive or linear narrative. Instead, it is the

collective contributions of multiple spaces, people and ideologies that create its character. I came

to understand the ephemeral nature of the city’s identity after having a room with a view onto the

airport. I became hyperaware of the way people come and leave. Because a large portion of Las

Vegas’ identity (sociologically and numerically) consists of tourists, this is especially important.

Tourists themselves are yet another intrinsic aspect of the city that works in tandem with heterotopic

hotel spaces. Tourists’ identities serve as signifiers of their own cultures and contribute to the same

bank of representations to which hotels contribute.

This abundance of images and representations creates opportunities for emancipation by

making it easier to sway between our own realities and those of others. The aesthetic experience

one has in Las Vegas blurs boundaries between worlds and helps us to “realize the contingency and

relativity of the ‘real’ world in which we have to live.”16 Intrinsic aspects of the city and selective

regurgitations of cultures and of the other lead us into imagining ourselves in different worlds. New

forms of being are imagined and emancipate us from our everyday.

Within the past decade the trend away from themed hotels and toward luxury hotels might

point to the spawning of a “mindset whereby buildings…are consumed in a touristic manner.”17

No longer do we seek the consumption of space or the consumption of otherness as Chaplin

postulates. Instead we seek the “consumption of experience.”18 This idea is exemplified by the Las

Vegas Neon Museum. While the space of the museum is neglected with glass on the ground and

little shade, the experience is unlike any other. One does not go to visit the museum, but instead

to experience history and Las Vegas past. Gone is the time when tourists craved the consumption

of the otherness that hotel spaces provided. Now, one needs to experience the building and,

more importantly, its offerings in its entirety. Kitsch is gone, and high-ceilinged lobbies, exclusive

16. Vattimo, “The Postmodern,” 10.

17. Hans Ibelings, Supermodernism Architecture in the Age of Globalization (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2002), 135.

18. Ibid.

10

driveways, elegant interiors and first-class treatment are in. Now when tourists leave a hotel they

hope to remember the experience they had rather than the place they were in (e.g., New York). This

is particularly evident in the recent construction of the CityCenter that is home to three hotels,

two condominium towers, a shopping mall, a convention center, a couple of dozen restaurants, a

private monorail, and a casino designed by the likes of architect Daniel Libeskind.19 Playing off

of the experiential quest tourists seek in going to themed hotels MGM Mirage hopes to appeal to

those tourists who seek luxury and a transcendent experiential, phenomenological, and above all,

architectural experience.

Similar to the parallels drawn with the heterotopic aspects of hotels and the city, perhaps

the desire to consume experience can also be applied to the city as a whole. That is to say, no longer

is even “experiencing” what the luxury hotels have to offer sufficient. Instead, we search for the

19. Paul Goldberger, “What Happens in Vegas: Can you bring architectural virtue to Sin City?,” The New Yorker, October 8, 2010, accessed December 12, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/skyline/2010/10/04/101004crsk_sky-line_goldberger

11

Crystals shopping center in CityCenterJanuary 2010http://www.flickr.com/photos/70929875@N00/4304836467/

Grand Canal Shopping AreaNovember 2010RJ Sakai

opportunity to experience those places and all their counterparts simultaneously. Las Vegas’ own

image is that of the hotels and intrinsic aspects of the city. It crowdsources to form the city brand

and experience. Hotels exist less and less as enclaves and begin to emerge as a whole experience.

Tourists want to be able to consume the experience of Las Vegas, and not just the hotel they are

staying at. They would like to hotel-hop and figure out which hotel offers the best night out, or

which has the most impressive lobby. This is evidenced by my recent 21st birthday celebration

in which we journeyed from hotel to hotel experiencing Las Vegas’ plethora of bars as well as

interstices.

Perhaps this movement toward the consumption of experience points to Las Vegas

acknowledging and promoting its heterotopic identity and capitalizing on it. This might signify a

move toward a marketing of a truer experience; to experience Las Vegas for what it is rather than

what tries to be. Experience-focused design signifies a confession on the part of the city that it is

unable to replicate a true Venice or New York experience. Las Vegas is creating its future by relying

on nothing more than what it has learned from its own past.

12

13

Bibliography

Bhabha, Homi. “DissemiNation: time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation.” In Nation and Narration, edited by Homi Bhabha. London and New York: Routledge, 1990: 291-322.

Borden, Iain, and Jane Rendell. “Heterotopia deserta: Las Vegas and other spaces.” Intersections: architectural histories and critical theories. London: Routledge, 2000. 203-220. Print.

DeKoven, Marianne. “Las Vegas Signs Taken for Wonders.” Utopia limited: the sixties and the emergence of the postmodern. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 72-113. Print.

Dear, M. J.. “A Tale of Two Cities: 2. Las Vegas.” The postmodern urban condition . Oxford, OX., England: Blackwell, 2000. 119-207. Print.

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Architecture culture, 1943-1968: a documentary anthology. New York: Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation :, 1993. 422. Print.

Ibelings, Hans. Supermodernism . enl. ed. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2007. Print.

Lasansky, D. Medina, Brian McLaren, and Jeffrey Cass. “Egypt on Steroids: Luxor Las Vegas and Postmodern Orientalism.” Architecture and tourism: perception, performance, and place. English ed. Oxford: Berg, 2004. 241-263. Print.

Lukas, Scott A.. “Theming as a Sensory Phenomenon: Discovering the Senses on the Las Vegas Strip.” The themed space: locating culture, nation, and self. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. 75-95. Print.

Meethan, Kevin. “Creating Tourist Spaces: from Modernity to Globalisation.” Tourism in global society: place, culture, consumption. Basingstoke, Hampshire [UK: Palgrave, 2001. 18-40. Print.

Rothman, Hal. “Cultural Tourism and the Future: What Las Vegas Tells Us about Ourselves.” The culture of tourism, the tourism of culture: selling the past to the present in the American southwest. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. 229-244. Print.

Vattimo, Gianni. “Introduction.” The transparent society. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. 1-11. Print.

Vattimo, Gianni. “From Utopia to Heterotopia.” The transparent society. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. 62-75. Print.