The new issue of LA+, PennDesign’s critically acclaimed interdisciplinary journal of landscape architecture, reminds readers of landscape architecture’s complicated relationship to the theme of pleasure, exploring the concept through art and design, science, philosophy, sociology, history, and geography. In an essay excerpted here, PennDesign Associate Professor of Urban Design Stefan Al takes readers to that infamous capital of pleasure, Las Vegas, describing how its leading casino developers have evolved their methods of mass seduction over time. To subscribe, visit LAPlusJournal.com, or purchase single issues at OroEditions.com.
In 1989, Steve Wynn placed a lagoon and an eight-story volcano, spewing columns of smoke and flame, in front of the Strip’s newest casino resort, the Mirage. Artificial scent masked the sulfuric gas emitted by the flames, and made the volcano smell like pi.a colada. The environment was further enhanced by the recorded sounds of chirping birds, giving way to roaring thunder every 15 minutes when the volcano ‘erupted’. On its opening day, 200,000 people witnessed the first ‘eruptions’ of the volcano, twice as many as expected.
Fueled by Wynn’s success, Bill Bennett promptly built Excalibur, a 30-story castle where Merlin exchanged fireballs with a three-story dragon. Not to be outdone, the Mirage responded with a pirate village where skirmishing pirates set a British battleship on fire, then sank it, every hour. The Luxor soon followed with a hollow pyramid large enough to stack nine jumbo jets, with the world’s brightest laser beam shooting from the top, fronted by a 10-story, laser-eyed Sphinx, upon which Kirk Kerkorian built an equally large cubist lion, its paws stretched out, its eyes staring down the Sphinx, with Dorothy, Scarecrow, and the Tin Man emerging from underneath its chin.
As outrageous as all this sounds, the ‘Disneyfication’ of the Strip was based on cold-blooded calculation. When the Disney Corporation had become the largest entertainment conglomerate in the world in the 1980s, casino developers mimicked Disney, hoping to attract their own share of the traveling family market. Wynn took the first plunge. When his volcano turned heads, others followed, and a true theme park war raged on the Strip. It led to a highly original era of Disney expressionism, and spawned companies specializing in fiberglass rock and pyrotechnics, building themed environments worldwide. The entire theme design industry’s slogan had even become: “You don’t look up ‘volcano’ in the Yellow Pages.”
By the end of this new phase of the Strip, Disney’s Animal Kingdom had been imported too. With all the bottlenose dolphins, white tigers, and toucans flown into the Mojave Desert, just a familiar rodent was missing to complete the picture — if only its copyright had expired, the Strip would undoubtedly have added a mouse ear—shaped casino to its skyline.
But unlike the serenity of Disney’s monopoly of Main Street, USA, multiple companies competed for the Las Vegas Strip. In the Strip’s distortion of Disneyland, pharaohs, pirates, hawkers, protesters, and honking cars all vie for attention. For a little more than a decade, Las Vegas led the world in Disney expressionism. And best of all, unlike Disneyland, it was free.
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