For 18 years now the Fontainebleau Casino has loomed over the North end of the Las Vegas Strip.  The tallest building in the state seemed to be almost invisible, an utterly lifeless structure cut off from everything around it by a simple chain-link fence.

The building’s unique-ish shape seems ill defined, and has become a symbol of failure.  Street artists painting murals of the Las Vegas skyline often left the Fontainebleau out of their art, and photographers photoshopped it away for postcards.

I lived less than a mile from it for five years.  I drove an Uber around it for months.  Yet I barely have any memory of seeing the building at all.  I know it was there, but I really have to dig for recollection in a way I don’t have to for other buildings in Las Vegas… even abandoned ones I never stepped foot in.

There is one wall of the Fontainebleau parking garage that definitely isn’t invisible to the residents of Turnberry Place.  But from the street that same wall just makes it look like Turnberry was built in a shadow box.  The wall just becomes some sort of odd background, utterly unremarkable in every way.

Now that the giant invisible hotel has been completed, we can take in the full horror that now anchors the North Strip.

The interior of the Fontainebleau is an architectural replica of Hillary Clinton’s circulatory system; icy cold, dull, unimaginative, ugly… and did I say cold already?  Well, the Fontainebleau is so cold-looking that it needs to be said twice.

They tried to do a Steve Wynn design without Steve Wynn; and it didn’t work out well.  Where the Wynn and Encore are artistic masterpieces, alive with colors, texture, and rich florals, parasols, and butterflies… the Fontainebleau is bleak, desolate, and hard looking.  Like Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, but colder.

It is just the latest in a long line of utterly forgettable Las Vegas hotels to open:  the Aliante, Resorts World, Aria, Vdara, Lucky Dragon, Durango, and Circa… all fairly new, all unremarkable, one even closed faster than it took to build (Lucky Dragon).  Another has a parking garage more famous than the hotel it serves (the Garage Mahal at Circa)

Gone are the days of buildings that were iconic before they even opened.  The buzz surrounding the construction of the Luxor, New York New York, and the Excalibur made the buildings famous even before they were topped off. 

Sands, Dunes, Flamingo, Rivera, Tropicana… all iconic, all memorable, all famous… it was more like checking into a movie star than a hotel.  The latest crop of billion-dollar properties are more along the lines of checking into a Kardashian… something stupid and ugly that occupies space where actual stars once existed.

Las Vegas is about to undergo a huge transformation anyway.  If California keeps their timetable for banning the sale of internal combustion engines, you can expect Las Vegas to become the largest auto mall in the world.

Primm, Nevada is poised perfectly to become Primm Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, Cadillac.  They have an empty mall that could be easily repurposed as a showroom.

Just 20 miles up the road Jean, Nevada is well suited to become Jean Ford Lincoln Nissan… right next to the world’s largest Chevron Station!

Las Vegas’ other big business will be conventions, the hotels that are being built are bland, formless blobs… perfect for housing DEI conventions of people who might be offended by something.  The “art” is all expensive and nondescript in these hotels… almost like they are planning on hosting snowflakes.

Meanwhile, serious gamblers are going to take advantage of the rash of new casinos being built in less expensive places like Terre Haute or Bartlesville.   

Las Vegas has hit a point in trying to maximize everything built on the strip, where they have crossed over some invisible line into the territory of “too much” with no direction. 

The themed hotels had a cohesive atmosphere, there was a common direction in the design process that translated into amazing large spaces.  Spaces that retained some level of intimacy, despite the gigantic scale. 

The new hotels lack any coherence, there is no theme and no identifiable design technique seems to be used to fill the space.  You can’t look at it and say things like: midcentury modern, rustic, Southwestern, Baroque, dark academia, Cape Cod… and know what is being described. 

Even the Wynn can be easily described: “It’s like stepping into an architectural rendition of a five-year-old girl’s imagination.” 

“Hillary’s frozen heart” and “Fortress of Solitude” doesn’t do any descriptive justice whatsoever to the design disasters of late.  Maybe Las Vegas will learn that bigger isn’t always better… and that themed hotels worked on a large scale for a reason, because large scale needs theming to look reasonable.

Image: Neaco