I mentioned City Center Las Vegas on here a couple of months ago, but I thought I’d post some pictures that I took. The project is really fascinating - it was the largest privately financed development in U.S. history at $9.2 billion.

Top left: Veer Towers, which house about 600 residential condos. 

Top right: Interior shot of Crystals, the shopping mall designed by Daniel Libeskind. You can really tell a lot more money was invested in it than the ROM (duh), and it’s covered in luxury brand logos on the outside. Really a spectacular space inside though.

Bottom left: Exterior shot of the Mandarin Hotel Las Vegas. The hotel lobby is located on the 23rd floor along with a bar with floor-to-ceiling windows that face the strip.

Bottom right: Most interesting about the site is that MGM invested $40 million dollars to establish a permanent collection of public art. Different pieces are scattered around both indoors and outdoors. This one is called Typewriter Eraser, Scale X by Claes Oldenburg and Coosie van Bruggen. We found out the concierge desk had maps to take yourself on a tour of all the art pieces, but it was dark by that point and our last night in town.

Six workers died in the construction of the project. Also, there’s a hotel on the site that got built, but not completed, and will be demolished by next year, because once it went up, an engineering firm found too many construction defects and concluded that the thing wouldn’t survive an earthquake.