STYLE : ARCHITECTURE : With Castles and Casinos, Pirates and Pyramids, The New Las Vegas is Betting On High-Stakes Style

Skeptics snickered when Stephen Wynn announced plans in 1986 to build a $670-million hotel-casino in Las Vegas. Not only would it be the priciest resort on the Strip--and require a cash flow of more than $1 million a day just to break even--but he also had the nerve to plan a gambling joint where you wouldn’t even see any slot machines when you walked through the front door. Instead, you’d be greeted by bronze statuary, a tropical rain forest and a couple of waterfalls, not to mention white tigers and a saltwater aquarium off to the side. Oh, and he wanted to call it the Mirage--a name, doubters sneered in consensus, that would aptly describe his profits.

Wynn had the last laugh when the Mirage opened in 1989. “There had been a terrible sameness to the properties of Las Vegas. The public couldn’t differentiate between the Sands, the Dunes, the Aladdin, the Sahara. I wanted to take it to a new level,” the chairman of Mirage Resorts Inc. says now. “We presented this place as an alternative for people who don’t consider themselves casino people. I always knew others would follow, as they have. But it has happened much faster than even I expected.”

In a city where aesthetics have long given way to adaptable, evolving, even disposable design, Wynn ushered in a larger, more permanent playground, the hotel-casino as elaborate, extravagant monument to the human imagination. A medieval castle with oversized turrets opened in 1990; a 357-foot-high pyramid and an 18th-Century pirate village each opened in October; and come Saturday, the billion-dollar MGM Grand will open, behind an 88-foot-tall lion that guards the yellow brick road to the Emerald City. And there’s more: ITT Sheraton promises to build a billion-dollar resort in the middle of the Strip, and Wynn, who recently bought and demolished the Dunes, is planning another place of his own.

Gambling remains the engine that drives Las Vegas, of course, but the city no longer enjoys a monopoly on the industry. Legalized gambling has spread across the nation, in the form of state lotteries, riverboat gambling and gambling halls on Native American reservations. (Caesars World Inc. plans to build the largest reservation gambling hall in California, in downtown Palm Springs, on land controlled by the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians.) And if Las Vegas is to continue to grow, it must reinvent itself as a city so compelling, so intriguing, so fascinating, that even non-gamblers will be lured here to experience it for themselves--and maybe drop a roll of quarters while they’re at it.

“You’re seeing market-driven design, where the competition has forced architects, designers and hotel owners to move on to new frontiers. As a group, we’ve had to push the envelope in design,” says Charles L. Silverman of Yates-Silverman Inc. in Irvine, who has been designing casino interiors for 32 years, most recently, those at Luxor and Excalibur. “No longer is our customer base the gambler. It’s anyone who walks through our doors. If enough people come in, enough of them will gamble. So we’re creating lavish palaces to attract them. Plain vanilla won’t work anymore.”

And you gotta have a gimmick--a working gimmick. For MGM Grand, it was as simple as securing the rights to the Wizard of Oz. Elsewhere, scads of ever-more-fantastical illusions have created jobs for scores of ever-more-resourceful craftsmen, tradesmen and technicians. Plumbers at the Mirage don scuba equipment to maintain the waterfalls of the entrance lagoon; inside the hotel, 17 florists work shifts around the clock to pamper the foilage. Carpenters and painters at Treasure Island are honing skills more common in theater and film, creating facades and backdrops in the main entry that look hundreds of years old, and horticulturalists there are trained in mountain-climbing and rappelling so that they can reach vines and plants in the nooks and crannies of the pirate village’s waterfront. MGM Grand’s payroll includes mechanics and engineers for the seven high-speed thrill rides in its back-lot theme park.

It’s not the old Vegas design, and they’re not the old Vegas designers. For instance, Tony-winning lighting director David Hersey, who won awards for “Evita,” “Cats” and “Les Miserables,” was brought in from London to illuminate the Mirage. He approached the task as he would a ballet production and bathed the hotel in incandescent gold rather than glaring neon because, he says, the existing displays of neon along the Strip couldn’t be topped. For good measure, he enlisted the help of entertainment-industry experts in special fire and water effects, most of whom had never before merged their talents on such a large scale, to design an erupting volcano with simulated lava as the Strip’s most dramatic stage prop.

Architect Jon Jerde of Venice is perhaps better known for urban landscapes ranging from Horton Plaza in San Diego to CityWalk in Universal City. But next door at Treasure Island, he designed the Strip’s first pirate village. His assistants searched through Europe, India and Nepal for doors, columns and other architectural remnants with which to make molds and cast authentic replicas. Today, Jerde is working for the downtown Las Vegas casinos, devising a plan to put four blocks of Fremont Street beneath a 100-foot-high canopy of lights so the sky above them will no longer be a black hole. Beneath the canopy, an aerial parade of lighted forms will bob and weave up and down the street.

“Las Vegas has to stay ahead of the game,” says Veldon Simpson, the locally based architect for Excalibur, Luxor and MGM Grand. “We have an obligation to stretch our imagination, to build the ultimate buildings. Civilizations are noted for their architecture, and when future anthropologists dig up Las Vegas, they’ll see a civilization that had the imagination and energy to go beyond what had ever been done before.”

His Luxor is a prime example. With a laser-eyed Sphinx, a canal masquerading as the Nile, two animated camels that talk and 2,526 hotel rooms, the 30-story pyramid was built by Circus Circus Enterprises Inc., using $375 million in cash earned by Circus Circus, Excalibur and other properties. Simpson recalls that the pyramid was originally envisioned only as a facade, with a free-standing hotel beside it. But those plans didn’t last long after he was able to show that construction costs could be reduced if the hotel rooms were honeycombed along the inward-slanting walls and that the rooms could provide the very insulation the structure otherwise lacked.

All of this is a far cry from the Strip in 1941, when the first combination hotel-casino on Las Vegas Boulevard, the El Rancho Vegas, played up the town’s frontier image. It fashioned itself as a dude ranch; its staff wore Western duds. The Last Frontier followed the next year. In 1946, Bugsy Siegel eschewed the sawdust joints for a more sophisticated place and built the decidedly more contemporary and upscale Flamingo. Las Vegas was coming of age.

The Strip soon flourished with a collection of free-standing casinos and motels. In time, the first high-rises appeared; they were hotels by any other name, but distinguished by the garish neon signs that advertised the fantasies the city offered. The ‘50s boomed with more hotel-casinos that have come and gone--including the Dunes, which introduced Minsky’s Follies, the first topless act in town, in 1957. The survivors include the Desert Inn, the Sahara and the Sands.

Casino interiors of this era favored shades of black, red and gold because they conjured up images of romance, excitement, intrigue and, yes, a little sin. And almost all casinos embraced the same unimaginative layout: registration desk to one side, bar on the other and green felt up the middle. Hotels counted on headliners to stand out in the crowd: Danny Thomas, Milton Berle, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Nat (King) Cole. It wasn’t until Lido de Paris opened at the Stardust in 1958 that Vegas boasted its first large-scale topless production show.

But the unveiling of Jay Sarno’s swank Caesars Palace in 1966 represented the greatest watershed in Las Vegas style. The building became the flagship of Sarno’s nationwide string of Cabana motels, with his trademark soft-lighted exterior screening. Breaking from Strip convention, he developed the grounds outside, evoking a Mediterranean estate with fountains and statuary. He threw in life-size fiberglass centurions stationed at the entrance. And inside, his attention to the details produced an aura of pampered Roman decadence, such as the Bacchanal restaurant where wine goddesses offer gentle massages while diners feast on a seven-course meal.

Sarno’s next project was equally innovative and perfectly contrary. It was conceived not out of a desire for architectural exotica but out of spite: Frustrated with pricey and temperamental entertainers, Sarno thought cheaper circus acts would help him cut costs and attract the masses. Thus, the pink and white big-top Circus Circus casino opened in 1968--first, with a merry-go-round out front and, later, a 126-foot-tall neon clown. Gamblers played slots beneath the safety net of a trapeze act.

Steve Wynn looked upon Sarno’s creations and realized that gambling wasn’t the only game in town. “From the brain of one man came two joints at opposite ends of the marketplace,” Wynn says. “They had very little in common and everything in common: Both were an experience. Just to go inside was a discovery experience. It’s what Disneyland is all about.”

Wynn himself began changing the face of Las Vegas in 1973 with his remake of the Golden Nugget downtown. He shed the neon facade in favor of softer lighting, whites and golds, so the hotel’s relative subtlety distinguished itself in Glitter Gulch. At the Mirage, Wynn departed from Strip kitsch again by introducing attractions not typically bankrolled in Las Vegas: the display of white tigers, the huge aquarium behind the registration desk and the dolphin pool out back. “Jay (Sarno) wanted to build a better joint for guys to shoot craps,” Wynn says. “We wanted to give them some extra excitement, beyond gambling.”

Enter the lagoon and its volcano centerpiece, whose flame is fed by an eight-inch-wide natural-gas pipeline delivering 400 million BTUs per hour. Down the sides of the 40-foot volcano rush 128,000 gallons of water a minute, recirculated by a 1,500-horsepower pump and lit by natural-gas jets so that the torrents appear to be on fire. To mask the sulfuric after-odor of burning gas, a pina colada scent was added.

Initially, Wynn had his doubts. “Steve’s first reaction to the volcano was concern that it would look like a cigarette lighter going off. I tried to assure him that it would look better than that,” designer Hersey says.

To ensure the effect could be executed, he and Don Brinkerhoff, director of design for Lifescapes, a Newport Beach landscape architecture firm, fashioned a working model of the volcano and its lagoon. “Steve told us, ‘I need the cascading water to be white so I can light it. Niagara Falls has white water, and I want white water.’ So we built a 12-foot model and had the water pour over a hinged panel. We found how far we had to pull the panel out to get the water to be white.”

The entire Mirage grew out of a series of miniature models in which Wynn’s in-house architectural team scrutinized everything through a periscope, then photographed it to obtain the guest’s perspective. They tinkered with every design aspect, from the placement of support columns to the choice of upholstery and carpets. If visitors can take their eyes off the slots and gaming tables, they’ll notice details such as milled teakwood and brass caps on the ends of decorative ceiling timbers.

Joel D. Bergman of Las Vegas, the chief Mirage architect, thinks the effort was worth it. “We have to give the public great credit in sensing the emotion of our buildings,” he says. “If they ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ just once, that doesn’t mean anything. The ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ have to continue.”

In the mainstreaming of Vegas, the metamorphosis naturally extends to the casinos themselves--and everything in them. Gone is some of the very mystique that the city banked on for years--windowless rooms (so day became night), liberal use of red and black (perceived as passionate colors) and the prohibition against children and cameras (adults needed peace and privacy). “We’ve taken the mystery out of gambling. Our casinos can be lighter, brighter, friendlier. We’re now entertainment centers, tourist attractions,” designer Silverman says.

Consider last year’s renovation of the Flamingo Hilton casino, long a forbidding gambling arena of dark green and red walls and ceilings. “The casino had none of the vibrancy or brightness of what we promised on the outside,” says interior designer Zoltan (Zoli) Kovacs of Toluca Lake, who gave the casino its face-lift. The remodeled room features off-white walls with splashes of orange, red, fuchsia and yellow, even artificial skylights for extra illumination. Like a Caribbean isle, the casino now complements the hotel’s sign out front. The 16-year-old pink neon and metal sculpture suggests flamingo plumage and was designed by Raul R. Rodriguez of Los Angeles, creator of close to 300 Rose Parade floats.

Slot machines (the favorite gambling device among tourists; locals prefer video poker) have been rethought as well. Now they offer more varieties of no-brainer play--with differing jackpot amounts depending on the number of coins inserted. There are also sit-down stations with larger symbols on the display reels for older players, and machines that accept paper currency of various denominations and dispense paper credits. Some even take casino credit cards, eliminating the need to carry any money at all.

All are built so their colorful silkscreened faces and the icons on the display reels can be changed at any time, says Tom Nieman, vice president/director of marketing at Bally Gaming Inc. “The visual clutter in a casino is staggering, so how do you get the players to focus on a slot machine? Through graphics.” Red-white-and-blue machines were especially popular during the Persian Gulf War, and Olympic themes always do well during the Olympic Games.

In the not-too-distant future, Nieman says, Video machines will sport larger monitors (19 inches instead of 13), players will be able to enjoy several kinds of games at one machine (poker, bingo or tick-tack-toe, among others), hotels may provide a menu of their entertainment performances and conveniently placed buttons will summon cocktail service. But that’s nothing.

Architect Veldon Simpson foresees a day when casino design will make a quantum leap. Slot players will be enclosed in a private virtual-reality environment--allowing three-dimensional interaction in a game based on the hotel theme. The more the gambler plays, the farther he advances in the virtual-reality game. “It’ll be like playing Nintendo,” he says. “When you get enough points, you become one of the virtual-reality characters yourself.”

No doubt it’ll be yet another gimmick in a city that’s steeped in gimmicks, a city that’s always been motivated by showmanship and one-upmanship, beckoning image-makers unfettered by convention. And as each one searches for the next big thing, anything goes in the design of a hotel, a casino, a sign, a slot machine.

“There will always be people in T-shirts, with their bellies hanging out, who you won’t see in tuxedos at the Hilton but who will be very comfortable standing in front of the talking camels,” designer Zoli Kovacs says.

Exactly, echoes Charles Silverman, who sold the Luxor on the robotic dromedaries: “We’re in a gimmick-laden society. Vegas has to be fun, and what’s more fun than two talking camels? Sure it’s hokey, but this is not the Natural History Museum.”

No, it’s Las Vegas.