Look at what you can’t have now: the intense reality of the Las Vegas Sphere

Trying to find out about the design of the Las Vegas Sphere reminded me of Tyler Durden’s ‘first rule of Fight Club’: you don’t talk about it. Because for a form that sits at about nine on the Richter scale of conspicuousness, it’s amazing how tight-lipped both client and architect, Populous, seemed to be about it.

Their reticence could have been caused by ongoing sensitivities around the longstanding planning application for a second Sphere proposed for London’s Stratford. But even after that was indignantly withdrawn by client MSG Entertainment this January, it seems neither party had anything more to add.

‘Thanks for reaching out again,’ said a tersely worded response from MSG following multiple attempts to contact it, but it wasn’t able to ‘facilitate interviews … and that still remains the case.’ It was as if, since it wasn’t allowed to perform its magic trick, it sure wasn’t going to give away how it did it. My own view here, therefore, is formed through a curious mix of the dry nature of the London Sphere planning documents and my experience of the Las Vegas reality, which was rather more immersive.  

In Las Vegas, a sunken form, 112m tall and 157m in diameter, somehow manages to hide itself – Houdini-like – in plain sight in this bizarre but thrilling city of 150,000 hotel rooms, most concentrated in towers; simulacra of Eiffel Towers, Egyptian pyramids, Roman fora and larger-than-life medieval Venetian landmarks. Here, in the madness of this postmodern cityscape, the Sphere seems quite at home, despite its singular nature and enormous steel exoskeleton. Its surface is covered in a high-tech skin of over a million LEDs, whose technical performance and brightness allow it to project dynamic digital imagery of any sort – including ads – at any time of night and day, which it happily seemed to be doing 24/7.

A word to the wise: don’t bother trying to get to the Sphere by foot – at least at ground level. As with much of Las Vegas, apart from its famous Strip, the city is pretty much non-navigable to bipods unless your two legs are sitting behind a wheel. And if you are, the best views of the Sphere are to be had from the east, driving down the north-south Paradise Road, where you get a good view of it in its waxing fullness over the Wynn Hotel’s unlikely city centre golf course.

From the west, it’s surprisingly hard to spot given the presence of high-rise hotel-casinos Harrah’s, the LINQ and, not least, the Venetian. But it’s from this last, via a massive casino floor and adjacent Expo Hall that the foot visitor gets their first close-up of the nocturnal and diurnally glowing orb. Even for Vegas, it’s something to behold. The quality of the moving images – despite your closeness – combined with the scale is quite mesmerising.

Of course, this is not a perfect sphere, but one made up of hundreds of triangular black stainless-steel, LED puck-studded panels with sides around 3m long. Behind it is the standing seam, rigid boards, acoustic insulation and secondary structure that connect it to the building’s steel exoskeleton primary structure. This triangular diagrid size extends up to 10m, to create structural interdependence with the auditorium’s levels of concrete tiered seating. Over it all, each of the 1.2m ‘puck’ units on its surface contains 48 diodes emitting the light to create its unique dynamic imagery.

The auditorium itself sits within its own thin concrete spherical shell, set inside the steel exoskeleton which, it appears, acts more as the primary means of acoustic attenuation – though Populous would have to confirm that. And between the two at the top of the Sphere is the main plant room, whose black-louvred panels follow the form and are requisitely LED-studded. Nothing is spoiling this show.

Ah, the show! The numerous androgynous robots dotted around the foyer that attempt to engage you as you pass them might serve as a distraction for the fact that, at this point, there’s little sense that you’re within the bowels of a sphere – odd, given what it looks like from the outside. Instead, you find yourself within a narrow but tall, blue neon-soaked atrium space, whose zig-zagging staircases clearly lead to upper levels while tall, concrete columns disappear up into the dark. The overall feeling, though, is more ‘new town’ than Newton’s Cenotaph – ‘of its time’ rather than ‘timeless’.

Of course, all of this ceases to matter when it comes to the main event. The vertiginous effect of being inside a sizeable sphere is apparent the moment you pass through the auditorium’s vomitoria doors to make your way to one of 17,600 seats; in front of you, a screen that curves around the ‘inner’ concrete skin, filling an entire area around and above you of approximately 15,000m². In fact, it’s less a screen than a transparent metal grid of fixed LEDs, creating a 16K pixel mesh that is stunning in its scale and colour rendition and helps explain the $2.3 billion cost it rose to.

I’m sure I’m not the first to raise an eyebrow at director Darren Aronofsky’s climate-crisis flick Postcard from Earth being screened in a building – and, indeed, a city – that hardly promotes low-carbon strategies. But no matter. As soon as I had sunk into my ‘haptic’ seat and the initial framing of its opening scene grew until it completely filled my field of vision, I have to say that, for its hour or so of visually stimulating but gossamer-thin plot, I didn’t much care about the planet. With its 1,600 high-tech ‘surround’ speakers, the technology’s effect is jaw-dropping – in two senses, at least, almost as good as the experience of the nature we’re a good way down the path of destroying. I’m sure Etienne-Louis Boullée, no stranger to the concept of ‘impact’, would have been impressed. I sure was.

But what’s good for the goose may not be good for the gander. Having put in an application in 2018 to build a second Sphere in London’s Stratford, MSG finally withdrew it in January after a five-year process. Paying £60 million for a 3ha, triangular car park site bordered by Elizabeth Line and London Overground tracks and Stratford International station box, its proposal for a 90m-high Sphere on a concrete plinth was given the green light by the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC), but this was overturned last November by London mayor Sadiq Khan, using Article 6 powers. The following month, communities secretary Michael Gove called in the project for a ministerial decision, at which point an exasperated MSG called time on the whole thing. ‘We cannot continue to participate in a process that is merely a political football between rival parties,’ said MSG’s Richard Constable in a closing letter, without hint of irony.

London is not Las Vegas it seems. Despite the initial consent, the GLA ruled that the Sphere failed to satisfy five of the LLDC’s own policies, at least nine London Plan ones and two from the NPPF, including, unsurprisingly, ‘its failure to support the transition to a low carbon economy’. And while I’d agree that offering to install blackout blinds in bedrooms at the Unite Students’ tower 50m across from it is not a valid mitigation measure, the sheer extremity of the Sphere proposal serves to highlight the planning’s process’s inherently political – and flawed – nature, the same guidance leading to binary-opposite outcomes. ‘When illuminated, the aim of the Sphere is to be eye-catching,’ said the GLA report, acknowledging its palpable lack of nuance. So, as evidenced here, guidance would, on paper, seem to err on the side of preserving the cityscape, or of promoting ‘green’ approaches – but is this the case?

We still have our Canary Wharfs and Vauxhalls, Aviva Studios and Edinburgh W Hotels and, in between, oceans of poorly designed, faceless housing developments that contribute nothing to our cities and are neither future-fit nor sustainable. By whose scrutiny do these make it through, and in whose interest? Strangely, that big black ball casts a light on it all. Faced with a ‘yes’ then a ‘no’ then a ‘maybe’, I can understand MSG walking away from the apparent lack of vision and impact of subjectivity on the process. No Sphere in London, perhaps. But without clarity – and bravery – no Louvre Pyramid either.