The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories

by Edward Hollis

  The happy couple ascend the marble steps into the Piazza San Marco, where they drink champagne and watch the masked figures of the Carnival amuse the crowd. They wander through gardens thick with cypresses and scented jasmine where the moonlight sparkles on countless pools of water. They pause to listen to soft music echoing from a hidden source around the vaults of a stone cloister; they crane their necks to admire the frescoes that adorn the ceiling of a great cupola. Then they stroll down the crooked streets, peering through shop windows at glittering carnival masks and fauns spun from glass.

  They pass through doors whose bronze handles have been wrought in the form of the férro that adorns the prow of a gondola, and find themselves in the upper loggia of the doge’s palace. All around them, Venetian monuments glow in the gloom. On the hour, the deep bell of San Marco resounds in the night air, and as it subsides it is joined by the peal of hundreds of church bells. Amid the clamor, the aging American billionaire and the ageless Italian film star watch fireworks scatter their colored gems on the rippling lagoon.

  They scarcely notice the volcano across the road, spewing out its piña colada–scented lava. They don’t care about sirens battling pirates or about the dreams of Steve Wynn. They go back inside, where Cher belts out “If I Could Turn Back Time” to a packed auditorium.

  The camera pans around the scene and takes in the assembled stars. The doge’s palace is center stage, framed on one side by the Ca’ d’Oro and on the other by the Rialto Bridge, which in turn leads straight to the bell tower of San Marco. It is as if the chief monuments of La Serenissima have huddled together for a group snap. Together, they resemble the seductive canvases that Canaletto painted to help his English milordi remember their grand tours.

  It’s all a set, of course, and the fanciest camerawork can’t hide it. The Grand Canal, the narrow lanes, and the Piazza San Marco have been turned into interiors: vast sound stages where the soft evening is carefully lit, air-conditioned, and set to the muted strains of Vivaldi. It is always dusk here, the time when it is no longer necessary to do anything other than to stroll, sit down with a drink, and imagine the pleasures of the night to come. This interior city has been freed from the four seasons and then set to their soundtrack.

  The Venetian is Venice as it should be: a delightful sequence of spectacles, a city that will never flood, never grow old or cold, a place where nothing untoward ever happens. Nobody says it’s real—the receptionist carefully points that fact out to arriving guests—but it’s a helluva show, thought through right down to the very last detail. Even the candy-striped mooring posts for the gondolas are made to lean slightly, as if they had spent decades sinking into the Venetian mud. The canals have been repainted several times to get the blue just right, and there were fierce debates about the sky in the Piazza San Marco: should the clouds be projected, painted, or made of fluff hung on fishing wire?

  The Venetian is not just a great set. The extras are perfect as well: the valets in the porte cochere are dressed as gondoliers, the security guards as carabinieri, and the cocktail waitresses as scantily clad harlequins. Characters from the commedia dell’arte stroll down the narrow lanes and perform in the piazza. They are listed in the hotel brochure as “Streetmosphere.” At the Enoteca San Marco, brusque waiters are clad in stonewashed jeans and crisp white shirts; they sport Gucci sunglasses on top of their heads and will serve only Peroni lager. The tourists, of course, are picture-perfect too, as they peer from the windows of the Bridge of Sighs and lean sighing on the parapet of the Ponte della Paglia.

  A MOTTO APPEARS on the screen: “Authenticity is the basis for fantasy.” The Venetian is both at the same time, reflects Qian Qichen. It’s a film of a city, a place of edited highlights spliced together with all the boring bits left on the cutting room floor. It’s Venice turned inside out, illuminated and set to music for dramatic effect. It’s a story with a happy ending, told just as a Hollywood director might tell it.

  And Venice is only one among many locations that have been through the elaborate Las Vegas postproduction process. As the Venetian dissolves on the screen, another video begins.

  Catherine Deneuve drives up the Champs Elysées, rides to the top of the Eiffel Tower, and presses a button that launches a floral explosion of fireworks into the Vegas sky. Leaning out into the hot night, she sees Lake Como, surrounded by a rocky shore dotted with Roman pines and romantic villas. She just has time to hear the piped chirruping of cicadas before the scene bursts into song. As the voices of Céline Dion and Andrea Bocelli rise into the night, so does the lake itself, in hundreds of fountains dancing in time to the music. The elegant French actress espies the Brooklyn Bridge decked out in fairy lights; the Statue of Liberty; the facade of Grand Central Station; and, rising above them all, the New York skyline, glittering as romantically as ever it might over the East River. She can hear the cries of the taxicab passengers as, strapped into their seats, they career on crazy roller-coaster tracks that twist around the great towers. Farther out, beyond the Statue of Liberty, she can make out visions of other places and times: the towers and battlements of the Excalibur, the gnomic black pyramid of the Luxor, the gilded towers of the Mandalay Bay.

  And somewhere beyond them all, down there in the desert, is an old sign that now stands more or less on its own by Route 91. In cheery, obsolete Perspex letters it says: welcome to las vegas.

  When it was first placed there, Vegas had looked like Vegas, a strip of flashing neon in the desert. It was Glitter Gulch. Now Vegas looks like everywhere else. It’s just like Venice, a city confected from the stolen images of others.

  QIAN QICHEN LOOKS at the palace his People’s Republic has stolen from its imperial past. He thinks of the portrait of Chairman Mao hung over the central entrance to the Forbidden City. Now the people stream in and out under Mao’s image through a portal that only the emperor was allowed to use, before history disposed of him.

  Once upon a time, no one left the Middle Kingdom of the emperor, and his millions of subjects were unaware of the existence of other worlds. They did not believe Marco Polo when he told them stories about Venice. Perhaps they still wouldn’t. Unless, that is, someone rebuilt it in front of their very eyes.

  Sheldon G. Adelson sees a smile flicker over the impassive face of Qian Qichen, and the potentate watches Adelson’s eyes widen as he sees it happen. It feels good being able to manipulate the thirdrichest man in the United States with a twitch. The construction of the Venetian in Las Vegas cost Adelson hundreds of millions of dollars; but he’s sure earned them back, as he might say. As he stands in front of the vice premier of China, his Sands Corporation boasts twenty-eight thousand employees. It has a stock value of around a hundred dollars a share, and there are some 355 million shares; Adelson controls at least two-thirds of them. Sheldon G. Adelson is the ruler of an extensive empire, whose heart is in the doge’s palace in the Venetian. His reach extends to Singapore, Israel, and Pennsylvania; and now he’s got his eye on the Cotai Peninsula.

  “THE BUSINESS CASE,” says the voice. Facts and figures flash over the screen; but good communist that he is, Qian Qichen gets the feeling that he might not have quite the same spin on them as the one Adelson would like him to.

  The Venetian contains some fourteen thousand inhabitants, who live in three towers some thirty-five stories tall. Every morning they awake to the alarm call and fumble for the remote, switching on the TV in the bathroom when they meant to open the curtains. They stumble down the corridors and wait for one of eighty elevators to arrive. The elevators are always crowded.

  Downstairs they sip a coffee and watch the people go by on the Grand Canal, or they gorge themselves in the Grand Lux Café, or they eat a McBreakfast in the food court. If they have to work, they make their way to the convention center, where five vast floors of meeting space are designed to anticipate every one of their needs. If they don’t, they lie by one of ten swimming pools and watch Kevin Federline being thrown out of the Tao Beach Club, or they retire to an airc
onditioned cabana, where they watch it on TV.

  If they are bored with the pool, they visit the casino, all 120,000 square feet of it. High rollers can retreat to private suites where cocktail waitresses have their favorite drink ready before they have even thought of asking for it. If they are bored with gambling, they shop at Barneys and Bottega Veneta, dawdling over handbags, shoes, and executive toys. If they are bored with shopping, they eat at one of eleven fine dining restaurants, or at one of the nine more casual establishments and two food courts nearby. All tastes are catered to by the extensive army of talented chefs overseen by Wolfgang Puck.

  If the resort guests get bored with shopping and eating, there is always the theater—The Phantom of the Opera, or the Blue Man Group, or the Cirque du Soleil, or just some cabaret. Afterward, if they don’t head back to gambling, they go clubbing at Tao, to check out whether the sisters at the bar are Olsen or Hilton.

  There used to be an art gallery at the Venetian, a branch of the Guggenheim. Designed by the prominent European architect Rem Koolhaas, it was a casket of treasures clad in corten steel. The first exhibition showcased masterpieces of impressionism. The second, curated by the enfant terrible Frank Gehry, addressed itself to the Art of the Motorcycle. The gallery is closed now. No one needs to look at art when they’re in Las Vegas.

  The fourteen thousand citizens of the Venetian are looked after by about the same number of servants. Silent Mexicans push cleaning trollies up and down the carpeted corridors; punchy actors read the incomprehensible menus in the restaurants; inscrutable Eurasian women deal cards and spin the wheels of fortune. They are the permanent inhabitants of the city, but their sole reason for existence is to service the temporary guests.

  And while the citizens of the Venetian wallow in luxury, their every move is tracked by security cameras discreetly mounted into chandeliers and the belt buckles of frescoed goddesses. No sooner have they opened the minibar, or lifted a box of cookies from the tray, than infrared sensors have charged their credit cards. If they’ve maxed out their cards at the tables, they can’t even get back into the elevator to return to their rooms and pack.

  Not that there’s any point in leaving. If they do, they find only more Venetians. Across the moats of freeway that surround the resort is another casino floor where beautiful Eurasian waitresses pollinate the gaming tables with brightly colored cocktails. Wolfgang Puck is running the high-end restaurants here too, and the Cirque du Soleil is once again performing in the theater. Every business need is met in the convention center, and there are air-conditioned cabanas by the pool.

  None of the fourteen thousand citizens of the Venetian stay there for more than a few days. After their holiday, they fly home to Boston or Pittsburgh or Minneapolis, relieved to see the rainy sky. But even weeks later, as they window-shop in a spectacular new mall, or listen to Vivaldi while on hold with a customer service representative, they’re still in Vegas.

  EVEN IF THEY go to Venice, moored like a cruise liner in an Adriatic lagoon. Some seventy-four thousand people arrive there every morning. If they have to work, they catch the early train or bus to avoid those who wander in later. If they don’t, they sit in a café and sip a coffee and nibble a croissant, watching the people go by.

  When they have had enough of watching other tourists, the guests stroll the streets and shop. They dawdle over shoes and handbags, glittery masks and fauns of spun glass. They rummage through junk stalls, hoping to find some forgotten treasure of La Serenissima or the Carnival. When they are tired of shopping, they queue up to pay the entry fees for the galleries and the scuole and the churches: the Guggenheim, the Accademia, the Frari, San Giovanni e Paolo, San Zaccaria. If the attraction is crowded, they are allowed ten minutes to look around, wandering through interiors piled with the relicts of a Serenissima that no longer exists.

  When they are sated with art, they eat carpaccio and drink Bellinis in the innumerable restaurants that line the squares and the canals; and when they are finished with eating, they go to the Fenice to see an opera. They don’t go to the cinema: aside from the annual film festival, there isn’t one. They don’t go clubbing: there aren’t any clubs.

  And then they fumble their way to bed. There are countless accommodations to choose from, ranging from the smart efficiency of the Danieli and the isolated luxury of the Cipriani to the rather more spartan arrangements of the youth hostel on the Giudecca. That’s in addition to the thousands of bed-and-breakfasts and furnished flats available for short-term rental.

  The permanent residents of Venice are a tiny number compared to the 11 million that visit them every year. There were 150,000 of them in 1950, but by 2008 there were only 58,000. Twice as many people die as are born here. At this rate, the city will be completely empty of permanent inhabitants by the year 2034.

  People can’t afford to stay: many of the flats have been turned into holiday rentals, and the prices of the ones that are left have skyrocketed. There’s a dwindling number of schools and precious little space for children. The residents depart in droves for the suburbs on the mainland, where houses are cheaper and there are actually things to do.

  One might imagine that a place confronted by certain and imminent extinction might devise radical strategies for its survival. But the inhabitants of Venice envisage no such progressive future. Instead they address themselves to the restoration of churches whose congregations have long since withered away, and the refurbishment of palazzi whose families are long defunct. When they discuss affordable housing, the construction of new buildings is not even considered.

  And why would it be? The city is booming, sustained by tourists who come in their millions to see the paintings of Canaletto in three dimensions. Every two years there is a Biennale, a showcase for all that is modern and innovative in architecture, design, and the arts. Yet this festival inhabits a place that hasn’t changed in centuries.

  Early each morning, the former residents of Venice commute back to what was once their home. While their guests are sleeping, they walk to the districts and the houses where they were raised. They turn down the beds in their old bedrooms, set out the breakfasts in their old dining rooms, and polish the glasses in the bars in which they used to drink.

  In April 2008, the last few permanent inhabitants staged a demonstration in the Piazza San Marco. They unfurled a banner upon which was written venice is not a hotel; but it is. After a few days their guests fly home to Paris, Edinburgh, or Munich. Perhaps they are relieved to see the rainy skies. Only later, as they wander around the old factory sensitively reconditioned as an arts space, or drink in the elegant bar that used to be a bank, or drive out to their weekend cottage in a village full of other weekend cottages, do they realize that they are still in Venice.

  QIAN QICHEN IS well schooled in Marxist philosophy, and he calls to mind a few snatches of Guy Debord. The citizens of the Venetian, he thinks, live lives “presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles,” where “everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.” Their world has become “a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.”

  It’s not so bad, thinks Qian, that separate pseudo-world, that autonomous movement of the nonliving. He is considering the millions of his subjects who have never traveled anywhere except to migrate to the great cities in search of work. They have never been on a vacation. They have never had the luxury of wandering about, bored, wondering what to look at next. They have never been able to be the quiescent consumers of spectacles. Perhaps it would be good for them.

  Sheldon G. Adelson senses that the brass ring is nearly within his grasp. He went to a soiree once with a load of intellectual scientists, but he didn’t think much of their endless discussions about the meaning of life. He later told an interviewer: “If I make other people feel good, I
feel good! I literally, mentally, went like—it’s over with! I don’t have to think about that issue ever again in my life.”

  The Eastern potentate and the Western purveyor of invisible cities both think of something Steve Wynn once said of his creations: “We start with one question. ‘Who are these people and what do they want?’ The answer controls everything we do. We respond to the emotional and psychological desires of our visitors. If this place has any other redeeming feature, I don’t know what it is.”

  If you already know everything that people want, and if the sole purpose of everything you do is to deliver it, then you have created a world in which every desire is anticipated, satisfied, and ultimately dictated. God gave mankind free will in the Garden of Eden. The creators of Vegas didn’t. Wynn once said, “Las Vegas is sort of like how God would do it if he had money.” He wasn’t joking.

  Sheldon G. Adelson conjures up one last invisible city. He hands Qian Qichen the mock-up of a glossy brochure that bears the image of the Venetian and the subtitle “Macao.”

  Even as this city moves forward, it has preserved its rich, European legacy for future generations to relive the past as they walk along cobble-stoned paths and gaze up at centuries-old temples and churches . . .

  The fully integrated resort-hotel features 3,000 allsuite guest rooms, one million square feet of Grand Canal Shoppes, a 15,000-seat Cotaistrip® CotaiArena™, 1.2 million square feet of convention and meeting facilities and a purpose-built theatre for ZAIA™, the new resident show from the world-renowned Cirque du Soleil® . . .

  The Venetian Macao is a fully integrated resort where you can wine, dine, shop, stay, play and still do some serious business.