Architectural collage has emerged as the characteristic gesture of the new wave of Las Vegas building. Bellagio has created an eight-acre lake for its entrance, meant to suggest Lake Como. The Eiffel Tower stands only half as tall as the real thing, but like the half-scale Statue of Liberty, it is no small structure. The whole of the Paris casino, with bistros and kiosks, lies beneath a false sky intended to simulate a Parisian twilight. As I soon discovered, down the Strip at The Venetian, the twilight sky provides another leitmotif in Las Vegas architecture these days.
Gondoliers ply their trade between stores.
Here, too, the light tells you it's about nine o'clock on a late-spring evening. This exuberance of fakery has its detractors, who tend to take a moral stance toward it. True, there have been days in New York when my appetite for that city could have been satisfied exactly by New York-New York, but it's hard to imagine that people think they're having a New York or a Venetian or a Parisian experience in Las Vegas. We like this architecture, if we do, for its ingenuity, not its realism. And indeed, compared with most buildings, these will prove as fleeting as a song.