Building Las Vegas: Finding and Shaping Identity in the Built Environment

• In Event: OHA Poster Session and Project Bazaar

Abstract

One might consider the palaces on the Las Vegas Strip and in downtown Las Vegas as high-density temporary dwellings—places where a tenant or visitor can try out a new persona, a new identity. How do these places encourage such identity shifts? One interior designer who has worked with Steve Wynn on his iconic buildings describes Wynn’s vision: “He's one of the few clients we've ever worked with who will say, "Okay, I walk in the door, how do I feel?" That's his question. It's not "What do I see?" It's "How do I feel?" And then, "What have you done to make me feel that way?’”

Our long-term dwellings are the most personal buildings that exist—the living spaces we remember from our earliest childhood. We all carry a lifetime of mental maps of the places we have lived over time. One of Southern Nevada’s wealthiest and most successful residential developers based his career on the places he called “home” in California’s Central Valley: riverside tents, an orphanage, and migrant rental units: “I had an interest in housing because of never having a house.”

The Building Las Vegas project aims to capture the growth and development of Southern Nevada by collecting oral histories of and forging relationships with builders, developers, architects, realtors, city planners and managers, and transportation planners as well as local leaders in flood control, culture, education, and parks and recreation. This project began on July 1, only six weeks ago. Even at this early stage, interviews of these professionals are capturing the ways that identity and urban spaces mutually shape each other.

The story of Southern Nevada’s planning, land use, architecture, building industry, environmental impacts, neighborhoods, and local businesses and firms over time reflects dynamism, adaptation, and innovation—and above all, identity.

Author

• Stefani Evans, University of Nevada Las Vegas