1.
Architect Bob Fielden has a nose for the weather. From a ridge in Henderson, he watches the slowly forming white clouds on the southern horizon on a largely sunny but windy day, clouds that are wispy and far away, and announces that a storm will pass through soon.
We're standing on 2.5 acres of empty desert at Kenneth and Carnegie in Henderson, across the street from a row of inoffensive homes and behind a gas station. On this land he will build just 16 units, in a style not often seen in these parts—a variation on the town house row. It's a tough order, trying to fit a piece of urban design into a suburban landscape, but he's hoping that his double row of attached town homes, which will face east-west and have third-floor "sky rooms" (glass-enclosed balconies for evening entertaining), will capture views of both the Black Mountains to our south, as well as the majestic view of the Las Vegas Valley to the west and north.
Fielden is the principal of RAFI: Planning, Architecture, Urban Design. Over the course of a 40-year career, his Vegas designs include the sharply angled Nevada Power Building on West Sahara, and the dazzling multicolored group of buildings at CCSN's Charleston campus. On this day a week or so before Christmas, he wears a Snoopy tie and has the genial features of a John Goodman, only with white hair. He's indulging me on a tour of Las Vegas' built environment. As we drive around the corner to a construction site, I realize that once you wind Fielden up, he's off to the races.
In Las Vegas there's a lot for an architect to get wound up about. One can appreciate the gaudy bravura of the Strip—some quintessentially American lowbrow populism that appeals to fat wallets and fleshy bodies. Or not.
But once you get beyond there, the distinctiveness of the city's built environment grows gossamer thin, mirage-like, dissolving in the imagination even as the city marches farther into the desert.
Fielden and I head around the corner from his project to another construction site, where a phalanx of detached town homes is slowly rising. The homes look inoffensive and conforming, but the small hill the site once sat on has been leveled, and the homes don't look like they're situated to take advantage of the views of the Valley.
It's the fault of the developers and the engineers, Fielden tells me. "Engineers are marvelous mathematicians. They can add, subtract, multiply and divide. And that's the limit of their education and training.
"It's just schlock," he says.
Fielden, 65, grew up in a small town outside Amarillo, Texas. His father wanted his children to become attorneys, but Fielden had a friend who wanted to become an architect, and Fielden decided to do the same. "I figured one attorney in the family was more than enough," he says.
He came to Las Vegas with his wife in 1964, on a job. He was 25. They both fell in love with the city, even though it was a town that "grew up without anyone caring how it grew. My work is trying to bring some sense of continuity between all these pieces that ties the whole Valley together."
Our day begins heading east on Tropicana from the intersection with Eastern. It's a long parade of faceless shopping centers built, he says, largely by out-of-town developers. We pass a shuttered fast food joint, and Fielden complains about the culture of "capitalism and exploitation" the streetscape represents.
"Shit, you have to get across 100 feet of right-of-way," he remarks.
Ten minutes later we are heading toward the corner of St. Rose Parkway and Eastern, enroute to the town house site. We pass the shimmering stucco offices for doctors and dentists, and the upscale food chains and big box retailers.
But, Fielden says, the fundamental material of Las Vegas is not real stucco. It's plastic stucco. I think maybe he's kidding.
"It's acrylic—a man-made acrylic that you can spray on. Buy it in a can, pump it through a gun, spray it on, walk away. Good for four or five years. It costs more, but it's faster." Actual stucco is composed of cement, sand, fine aggregate and a bit of lime. Fake stucco comes from petroleum.
I find it interesting that in a town and culture so given to impermanence, the look of Tropicana, or Pecos, or Eastern, feels like it will be with us for many years to come. The plastic has become permanent.
On our way to Henderson, I ask whether there was any indigenous, or at least regional, design language at work in Las Vegas. Not really, he says, with so much of the Valley's look imported from Southern California.
"If we look to history, you go back to the Anasazi," he says. "They certainly lived here thousands of years ago. They had permanent homes and communities for 700 years." Their dwellings, he says, were half-subterranean. It was probably not as hot here then. They likely lived in the valley in the winter and went to the mountains in the summer. "There is nothing indigenous in the look here." And as if to prove the point, we find ourselves staring at a sort of Georgian-looking Comprehensive Dentistry building out on Horizon Ridge. It's a large and lonely building, all dressed up and with no place to go. "Do you think of the desert when you look at that?"
I don't even think about my teeth when I see that building.
Of course, old Henderson has a bit of authenticity, a sense of place that has lasted. Fielden drives by some of the ramshackle houses near Downtown, designed as temporary shelter for workers at the nearby magnesium plant. Fielden says the homes were never designed to last this long, and inevitably they will yield to the cycle of progress. It's not like the neighborhood has aged very well, true, but suddenly I detect from Fielden a tone of urban renewal—that misguided mid-century practice that laid waste to the hearts of so many cities.
"The people living here have to understand they can be a part of it, or they can oppose it. If you want to be a part of it, you can benefit from it. If you want to oppose it, you're not going to have anything."
The most interesting building we saw was a deco-looking senior housing high-rise, dipped in a Wonka-like vat of bright colors and tucked out of the way just east of Downtown.
It's late in the afternoon when we roll into downtown Vegas. Fielden was right. The sky has turned gray and the day chilly. We pass through residential blocks east of Downtown, where many of the nice older homes have been snatched up and converted into law offices. I don't know what that bodes for the future of the neighborhood, but the tall trees and tight grid feel stable and comfortable.
After a morning of some of Fielden's least-favorite places, he takes me by two of his gems. The first is Las Vegas Academy, a cream-colored wedding cake of art deco, ringed by a gold-colored frieze around the top. On the front side, over the doors are a trio of brightly colored Mayan-style emblems. "It's a piece of heritage. It's just nicely done."
A few blocks over is a Tudor-style church, now home to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Built in the late-'30s and surrounded by a few healthy evergreen trees, it feels like it belongs east of the Mississippi. The church has steeply pitched roofs and light stained-glass windows. "It's very soft, very simple," he says. "It's like house shoes."
We head west. Looming over the rooftops like a stern flying carpet is the canopy roof of the Lloyd D. George U.S. Federal Courthouse, suspended over an exterior plaza by a large pole. It's a building that forces you to look up in wonder both inside and out. (The roof of the one-story circular lobby is glass and offers its own powerful view straight up to the canopy.) The building is "probably one of the few pieces of real architecture in the community." The canopy provides an iconic shape on the skyline, and standing underneath sort of reminds me of being a child, watched over by giant parents.
I figured he'd dig the Furniture Mart, the large hunk of building under construction adjacent to the Clark County Government Center. Its materials have a rough-hewn, desert-toned texture, and the voluptuous curves in its façade feel entirely at home in Sin City.
"Ehhhh," Fielden says. "It's just a big box. A big dumb box. And the architecture is copied off a building done back in Minneapolis."
We parked at the bastard child of bad development, the Neonopolis mall. "Neonopolis was probably the biggest, dumbest thing anyone ever did, and they're living with it, with the results of it. It was planned wrong and designed wrong and built wrong."
When I ask Fielden to elaborate, he takes me directly to the bus stop on the Las Vegas Boulevard side. Because the building comes so close to the street, there's hardly any room for pedestrians to queue, let alone for anyone else to squeeze by. And the whole place is so dreary, who would want to?
Especially since in the summer there is no shade. "There are absolutely no provisions made for people at all. There's no way anything like that should ever be allowed. That's what happens when you put developers in charge of something, rather than design professionals."
Inside there is the dark, uninviting glass of Jillian's restaurant—darkened to block the foreboding sun on the south side, then the dark and uninviting tunnel leading into the main atrium. Except for some Christmas music, the only sound is the clicking of our steps, and the only people—not counting the forlorn looking workers—are us.
What could they have done? "Horton Plaza [in San Diego] was an early model, but they didn't have the space to do it. If they wanted to do that they should have taken this whole block and developed it there." At the least, they could have brought the light energy of the atrium much closer to the street.
We wash Neonopolis down with a refreshing drink of Las Vegas Boulevard. The upper end of the street is his favorite, the small-town vibe you get around Charleston. "It's a great place for cruising, if you had a big old '57 Chevy convertible." We head onto the Strip—"the place I never go; this is our industrial area"—and pass the sign of the Stardust, which he designed in 1965. He cantilevered the lighted stars away from the sign face by several feet to give the sign its rich three-dimensional character.
And then we drive by the enormous and always-growing Caesars Palace, which has been in Vegas about as long as Fielden. The casino typifies "bastard baroque. But just about everything is here, in that sense. I love it."
2.
Last week, I hit the road with Brandon Sprague, the AIA Young Architect Citation Winner in 2004. Sprague's notable projects include the Paseo Verde Library in Henderson, with its low-to-the-ground profile and sweeping glass-walled reading room, as well as the elegant curves and dynamic angled windows of the Beam Music Center at UNLV.
Sprague is a third-generation Las Vegan who's always wanted to be an architect.
He studied architecture at the University of New Mexico and the University of Illinois, worked in Las Vegas, spent 18 months in Chicago at blue-chip firm SOM, and then returned to the desert. Last year he founded his own firm, Aptus Architecture, housed in the second floor of an adobe-style office building near Charleston and Fourth.
He wasn't sure he wanted to come back. "The quality of life here," he says with a pause and an exhale, "is questionable. Part of the reason we're here is to try to see what we can do for our little part."
Despite their differences in age and background, both architects bemoaned the mediocre design in Vegas—but with the passion of idealists, not the grumpiness of cynics. Many of the sins of bad architecture here, it seems, may simply be a function of too many glass walls that face south.
We head up through Downtown, and Sprague echoes Fielden on the federal courthouse. "It's so neat how someone can come into our city and appreciate the desert more than a lot of people who are here. It's a big, bold idea that's so right. It's a classy building. It raises the bar for the rest of us."
We swing by the Las Vegas Academy, but Sprague seems more enamored of a tiny white bungalow down the street. "The little porch and all of that. That's so cool. You could see somebody living in that."
But he notes that the still-barricaded Regional Justice Center, with its flourishes of red stone and glass, plays off the academy. He swings around the building to its east face. "See how the side columns along the red brick face. To me, that's the same kind of pattern language as the high school. I like how they tried to tie that together." He also likes the building's human scale along the street and its impressive, "gestural" entrance.
As we swing past the furniture mart, I ask Sprague what he thinks. Having learned my lesson, I figured he would unload on it, and he tells me that a few months ago, he would have. It was a "big, freaking, hulking rectangle." Then he realized the square punch openings that stud the building are not windows but louvers—despite its external flourishes, it's a building that basically looked inward.
So Sprague changed his mind. "It's OK, it's like a sculpture. That's all it could be. I think I'm OK with it."
He, too, takes me through Henderson.
Fielden's focus in the suburbs was on obliviously situated homes. For Sprague, it's those damn walls. The ubiquitous cinderblock walls of Las Vegas are what have taken a newcomer like me so much time to get used to. I grew up in suburbia, too, in the Midwest, but there were no walls. Fences, here and there, but not roads like Pebble, with its long canyon of dead blank prison walls, or an even more brutal streetscape on Pollock Avenue. If there's such a thing as an anti-street, here it is.
"People don't want to walk on streets like that," he says. "This is just a horrible street."
A mile or so over we swing through a vision of an older Las Vegas on Serene Avenue. There are individual homes in the desert. No master-planned communities with overwrought names. No walls. No sidewalks. OK, there's a strange little house with an Amityville Horror-style mansard roof. It's straight from the distinguished—and much copied—architectural school of Ugly. Still, the desert through here is more immediate, more real.
Then Sprague drives us back to the post-you-name-it exurban landscape. We come along the Green Valley Ranch resort, which has always felt more tasteful than other casinos in town, and then onto the District.
"This is what people will construe to be local architecture, that come from outside," Sprague says. "But to me that's not indigenous. That's kind of a Florentine-Spanish, whatever the hell you want to blend style."
Sprague has his thoughts on stucco, too. "We're so used to 'What color is your stucco going to be?' But if you look at really good architecture that's been around for a long time, it's not the paint color. It's about the materials you use. And those materials you use have their own integral color. When you say sandstone you don't have to say red sandstone.
Paseo Verde Parkway is a more successful suburban road, Sprague says. Its curves create anticipation. Its walls are modestly decorated, they are not large, and they're set back from the street and fronted by a green strip of parkway with a trail. It is the ideal of the suburbs—a planned synthesis of the city and the country.
Twenty minutes later, we are racing up Interstate 95, past Whitney Mesa. When Sprague was younger he used to ride his motorbike to the top and survey the city. It seemed like a good place to build a restaurant.
Instead, someone is building a complex of yellow and orange apartments. Like Fielden, Sprague is not crazy about the habit in Las Vegas of grading elevations flat, instead of taking advantage of inclines in the design. "Look how ugly those apartments are," he says. "Those are even bad apartments for apartments. So they get a great view and they put the ugliest apartments you possibly can do on them. They're just like anywhere else in town. They don't talk about the view at all."
We arrive at UNLV. Sprague likes designing for campuses. The buildings have no back sides. "This is where you can do architecture."
But he doesn't like the Bigelow Health Sciences Building on the northwest side of the UNLV. Its distinguishing features are a strange X-pattern on its columns and a red cube-like upper structure.
"I hate this building," Sprague says. "I mean, it's a big cube on all four sides. It pays no attention to its environment. It can give a shit who's inside whatever space, 'cause it's gotta be roasting hot in there. So your mechanical system is using more energy. That building is just pissing me off, especially on a campus when you're showing the community how to do good work. That just sets us back."
We head up Paradise, a street Sprague no longer recognizes with its hulky monorail pillars. To the left is the sleek Metropolis condo tower with its striking black and green zigzag ornamentation, but all Sprague sees are huge windows that face (where else?) to the south. The windows are not screened. "I know that's where the view is, but they're going to boil."
Sprague is aware that, someday, others will inspect what he and Fielden, other architects, developers and city officials have done. "They're gonna write about us. All the planners are gonna look at this city in 10 or 20 years and ask, what did they do?"
But, hey, he's come around on the Stratosphere. He hated it at first—or better, he hated the idea of it, the vertical assault on the sky was how other cities preened. Not Las Vegas. But he's come to appreciate the architecture on the top part of the tower. "It curves up, and I like the little lace on the bottom part of the curve."