Las Vegas keeps building monuments to the future, only to watch the future pass them on opening day

Buildings are snapshots of the moment they were conceived, sometimes as a sketch on paper, not the moment they were completed. And those two moments can belong to completely different eras.

A building can take five years to go from sketch to opening. And Las Vegas has an extra problem: the project is not merely constructing a building. It is constructing an experience under one roof. Hotel, restaurants, casinos, spas, clubs, pools, retail and entertainment all have to open together as a complound, looking finished.

By the time the architecture arrives, the idea of “new” may already have moved on. Opening in 2006/2007, these MGM triplets were born carrying yesterday’s idea of tomorrow. They opened brand-new, but stylistically they had already missed their moment. By the time they opened, the design world had already moved beyond postmodernism.

In Las Vegas, many 1990s and 2000s buildings opened as relics of a recent past: brand-new structures built around yesterday’s idea of the glamour, too permanent to be changed, they are stark reminders that architecture moves much slower than taste.