General Design
The project straddles Harmon Avenue and is bordered by (listed clockwise, starting on the east side): Las Vegas Boulevard, the Monte Carlo Resort, I-15, the Bellagio, and The Cosmopolitan Resort & Casino. The site was formerly occupied by the Boardwalk Hotel and Casino, the Bellagio employee parking lot, and several standalone commercial structures.
The conceptual master plan for Project City Center was designed by Ehrenkrantz, Eckstut & Kuhn Architects, laying out the project with approximately 2,400 condominium and condo-hotel units and approximately 4,800 hotel rooms, distributed within several high-rise towers around The Crystals, an ultra high-end retail mall. It is designed to have all commodities for daily life, featuring a 4,000-room hotel and casino (Aria), two 400-room boutique hotels (The Residences at Mandarin Oriental, with 227 residential condo units, and the Harmon Hotel and Spa), a purely residential offering (Veer Towers), a condo-hotel (Vdara Condo-hotel) and a 500,000 sq ft (46,000 m2) retail and entertainment district which was intended to house the first grocery store directly on the Strip (though as of July 2011, there is no grocery on the property). The multi-use project makes extensive use of green technologies, such as using reclaimed water and an on-site power plant. The Mandarin Oriental, Aria, and Vdara all received LEED certification in November 2009.
With a total cost of approximately $9.2 billion, CityCenter is the largest privately financed development in the United States. The original cost estimate was $4 billion, but it was pushed up by rising construction costs and design changes. CityCenter opened with approximately 12,000 employees across the different projects. Vdara, Aria, Mandarin Oriental, and The Crystals opened in December 2009. The Veer Towers opened in July 2010.
CityCenter features five water and ice features. These were designed by WET Design the company responsible for the Bellagio fountain and the Mirage volcano. Three of these features are located at Aria Resort & Casino, Lumina, Focus, and Latisse. The remaining two are located in The Crystals, Halo and Glacia.
Read more about this topic: City Center
Famous quotes containing the words general and/or design:
“The general feeling was, and for a long time remained, that one had several children in order to keep just a few. As late as the seventeenth century . . . people could not allow themselves to become too attached to something that was regarded as a probable loss. This is the reason for certain remarks which shock our present-day sensibility, such as Montaigne’s observation, “I have lost two or three children in their infancy, not without regret, but without great sorrow.””
—Philippe Ariés (20th century)
“For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)