INTERNATIONAL DESIGN MAGAZINE

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1999

WET DREAMS
By Tom Vanderbilt
Water, rather then neon, is dazzling tourists and selling fantasy on the
modern-day Strip. But how long before this desert oasis runs dry? 

The largest fountain in the world is found in the driest big city in America.
This is an irony best served with a twilight dinner at Olive's, one of the
restaurants at Steve Wynn's Bellagio, where an art museum full of
Impressionist masterworks and a Tiffany's are said to herald a new Las
Vegas, one that eschews neon and steam-table buffets in favor of Italian
marble and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Olive's terrace overlooks an
artificial lake that, stretching out more than eight acres, seems an anomaly
in a place that gets less rain in a year than New York gets during a
vigorous thunderstorm. From here, though, the lake, framed on one side
by the Eiffel Tower of the forthcoming Paris Las Vegas and on the other
by New York-New York's Statue of Liberty, seems like just another
spectacle, no more or less appropriate than its odd surroundings.

A series of small, black nozzle-like objects suddenly emerges from the
lake's placid surface. As the opening notes of "Singin' in the Rain" sound
from off in the distance, water begins to spout, the  nozzles start spinning
and shimmying and the liquid arcs and jets swoop through the air with a
strikingly human rhythm. The restaurant patrons crowd at the terrace rail.
At one particularly heated point in the song, a long row of nozzles begins
to shoot—in chorus-line sequence—remarkably thin, unbroken columns
of water several hundred feet into the air. A noise I take for thunder—
actually compressed air blasting forth from the nozzles—peals across the
early evening sky. As the spectacle nears its end, the water, after hanging
for a moment against the cobalt Nevada dusk, begins to drift downward,
and the wind drives a sheet of mist toward the terrace. That's when it
becomes clear why the tables have umbrellas open over them even long 
after the sun has gone down. 

In the gardens of Renaissance Europe—symbolic homages toEden—
royal hosts would take delight in splashing a visitor with a hidden fountain.
The jest was a moment of spontaneity in an otherwise controlled
environment. In Las Vegas, where a latter-day  approximation of Eden
has risen out of the desert, there is no greater surprise than water, and as
the mist hits me I feel the object of some grand whimsy on the part of
Steve Wynn, probably the closest thing Vegas has to royalty. Wynn has
turned the Strip into his own pleasure garden, amusing the milling crowds
with a variety of free shows that, like the Bellagio's fountains, rely on
water: Two of the most lavish are Treasure Island's Buccaneer Bay,
where British and Spanish galleons exchange fire at two-hour intervals,
and the volcano at the Polynesian-themed Mirage, which, by throwing
colored lights upon cascading water, creates the illusion of lava. Water,
Wynn has said, is at the heart of the juxtaposition between fantasy and
reality on which Las Vegas subsists. The kinetic medium is becoming 
the city's new neon, upping the ante on the collective fantasy that this is
a land where anything's possible.

Natural artesian wells fed the needs of the city's early populace, but 
from the 1940s onward, as Las Vegas grew, the population had to 
rely increasingly on the transport of water from the Colorado River, 
which Marc Reisner, author of Cadillac Desert: The American West 
and Its Disappearing Water, calls "the most legislated, most debated
and most litigated river in the entire world." Without the water of the
Colorado, Las Vegas, Arizona, Utah and much of Southern California
would not be able to sustain even a fraction of the populations they do
today. Under the 1922 Colorado River Compact, better known as the
"Law of the River," Nevada was given famously short shrift, primarily
because it was largely uninhabited at the time. Few suspected that Las
Vegas would one day become the nation's fastest growing city. While
California gets more than four million acre-feet of Colorado River 
water a year (an acre-foot equals roughly 325,000 gallons), Nevada
gets just 300,000—plus the additional 150,000 it receives for depositing
the same amount of treated waste-water back into the river, a system 
known as "return-flow credits."

Las Vegas has always oscillated between an acute concern and a flagrant
disregard for  its water-related precariousness. Officials were already 
limiting well permits by 1961, even as the Strip was booming; the city's
population has multiplied more than tenfold since then. As the population
grows, the measures the city invokes to conserve have become more 
extreme: stepped-up conservation (new housing developments feature 
xeriscaping, or desert landscaping), higher water rates, a plan (since 
abandoned) to siphon water from the agricultural regions of central 
Nevada, the purchase of water from private individuals holding water
rights and, currently under investigation, a plan to buy water from 
neighboring Arizona.

In Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, the narrator grasps for the perfect
vacation destination: "If one wanted to travel overnight to somewhere 
incomparable, to a fantastic mutation of normal reality, where would 
one go?" His answer, of course, was Venice, but today it would seem
more appropriate to go to Sheldon Adelson's new Venetian in Las 
Vegas, a $1.4 billion rendering of Renaissance Venice that has risen, 
quite literally, out of the sand. The mega-resort occupies the land upon
which the Sands Hotel, imploded in 1996, once stood. From my suite
on the 39th floor looking out onto the dun-colored desert, I watch an 
army of workers on the concrete below rush to complete the Venetian's
five acres of pools. The incongruity of creating an allusion in the desert 
to a city wedded to the sea is made plain.

But the Venetian, like the costumed characters who sing and joke with
guests in its hallways, wears an ingenious mask. Central to its illusion is
water: The first thing most visitors see is the 536,000-gallon canal (filled,
like most casino water features, with recycled "graywater") running in 
front of the resort. It is an altogether modest body of water, yet it 
provides relief from the arid brightness of the Strip's sidewalk and lures
pedestrians across its "Bridge of Sighs." As I stood on the bridge one
morning, a number of  passersby asked security guards if rides would 
be available in the half-dozen parked gondolas. The answer was no, not
least because it would be a short ride: The canal in reality goes nowhere,
and what seem to be passageways connecting it to the back of the hotel
are merely to trompes l'oeil. The illusion is carried forth on land in a blue
swath painted across the hotel entrance, connecting the canal to the
replica Campanile, a 315-foot tower that is entirely empty, functioning
essentially as a sign post. Inside, the Grand Canal runs as a 680-foot,
278,000-gallon artery (potable water this time) down the middle of a
500,000-square foot indoor mall; it actually sits above the casino and 
the exterior canal. One morning, Venetian spokesman Brad Packer 
shows me the mall, still under construction. Donning hard hats, we 
enter the space, a replica of a street in Venice, with storefronts rather
than houses and a 70-foot ceiling whose color and appearance change
depending on the time of day. "The whole idea is to make you feel like
you're walking through Renaissance Venice," says Packer over the din
of welding machines and piped-in music. As we walk, I notice a gondola
full of men wearing jeans and t-shirts coming the other way; they are the
apprentice drivers who will soon be shuttling shoppers up and down the
canal. When a planned extension of the Venetian opens later this year, 
the canal will stretch to 1,000 feet, though it will still not connect to water
anywhere else. "I can tell someone five times that the water outside does
not connect with the water inside," says Packer, "and they'll still ask, 
'Where does this connect to the water outside?" 

In their 1972 tract Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi and Denise
Scott Brown derided a "Strip Beautification" program for trying to mimic
the fountains and trees of the Champs Elysées. They suggested instead 
that Vegas's model should be the Near East: "Maximum effect with a 
minimum amount of water." As the city has progressed through various
stages of development and modes of tourism, the dry aesthetic has been
abandoned for the same kind of gargantuanism that characterizes 
everything here. This process can be charted by the very names of the
casinos: They have evolved from western tropes (Golden Nugget,
Frontier) to a desert mythos (Sands, Dunes, Sahara, Aladdin) to a
European or tropical romanticism (Bellagio, Venetian, Paris, Rio,
Mandalay Bay). In moving away from the desert theme, the landscape has
only grown more lush, the water features more elaborate.

"Welcome to a place where all the world is water, and the stage is all
the world," reads the program for O, the Cirque de Soleil show at the
Bellagio, whose action takes place partially underwater. But the tag 
line might just as well refer to the Strip, where a walk from end to end
reveals water everywhere, from the small, almost garishly green patch
of lawn in front of Circus Circus, to the fire boat sailing along an 
imaginary East River in front of New York New York, sending jets 
of water into the air in what seems a futile effort to dampen the 100-degree heat. The most recently built casinos have further raised
the liquid stakes. Mandalay Bay, for example, offers an enviroment
as wet and tropical as Southeast Asia's, arranged around a huge,
Caribbean-blue wave pool. The Venetian's planned expansion, 
modeled on the Palazzo Barbariggio of Venice's Grand Canal, will
feature water terraces ascending a domed harbor rotunda and a 
water barge that, in another place and time, might have ferried nobles
to the doge's summer palace. Stratosphere and Vegas World developer
Bob Stupak, meanwhile, is considering a casino based on the movie
Titanic.

Although the casinos on the Strip, with their lush landscaping and
extravagant water features, are routinely depicted as the culprits 
responsible for the city's ever-increasing thirst, they actually only 
account for about eight percent of the city's water usage. As Susan
Selby, a manager with the Southern Nevada Water Authority, points
out, that is roughly the same amount consumed by the primary industries
of other southwestern cities. "Two-thirds of the water is used by people
living here," she says. "You can't just point your finger at the casinos." 
In fact, because of the city's recent adoption of "block-rate" water 
metering, which halted the practice of charging large users less, casinos
are prone to be as cost-conscious as possible. The Mirage's water bill
alone, it was estimated a few years ago, is well over $60,000 a month.
Yet Las Vegas's homeowners use even more than the city's golf courses,
and while lawns are small on average, when multiplied by several hundred
thousand homes, their watering needs add up to a significant drain. 
Water-connection charges for new houses are among the highest in
the country, though, a deliberate effort by the water authority to avoid
transferring the cost of growth to existing users. Curiously, the cost of 
water in Las Vegas is quite low—less than in rainy Seattle—but it's 
rising, from 73 cents per thousand gallons in 1989 to 98 cents per 
thousand gallons now.

Las Vegas use a lot of water—an average of 300 gallons per day per
person, nearly one and a half times as much as Phoenix's populace
consumes. While a whole host of factors figure into this calculation, 
in Las Vegas there is a point at which numbers begin to slip from any 
relation to reality, as arbitrary as a roulette spin. Those 300 gallons 
are the lifeblood of a strange confluence of dreams, of the spirit of
Western independence and heroic engineering that make this whole
place possible (how else would a subdivision called "Desert Shores"
even begin to make sense?), of the spirit of eternal abundance set 
within a landscape of death and emptiness. How can one possibly
conserve in an enviroment that's all about consumption, the arctic 
drift of ice cubes on salad bars, the perpetual spring of alcohol, the
willful offering up of money that, most likely, will be lost forever?

One afternoon, I drive to Lake Las Vegas, a multimillion-dollar gated
community begun in 1989 on what was the last artificial lake allowed 
in Las Vegas (Wynn's Lake Bellagio is fed by privately owned water
rights, and thus was not subject to the ban). With its 10-mile shoreline
and an area of 320 acres, Lake Las Vegas is billed as "the largest 
privately owned lake in Nevada." Looking out onto a wide vista, 
I notice that there are only three colors in this landscape: the khaki
colored sand, the turquoise water and the emerald hue of the lawns
and golf courses. It is an utterly elemental landscape. There is no 
middle ground: The grass is either perfect or it does not exist. Later, 
I meet with Larry Paulson, a retired limnologist from the University
of Nevada whose specialty is Lake Mead, the artificial lake formed
by Hoover Dam that sits like a psychic barometer of the city's
health. "We like our reservoirs full out here," says Paulson. "It's like
religion. It's in our nature. We don't like to get far from the water. 
We just happen to be in an enviroment where, if you go 25 miles 
out and sit along the shores of Lake Mead, you have all that water
sitting there. But if you can't get to it, you're a dead man."

The signal human achievement that sustains a city that nature would
not otherwise allow is found far from Las Vegas, past Boulder City
and up a series of switchbacks cut into the anthracite hills. Hoover 
Dam is the area's ultimate water feature, not only the essential giver
of life but an enduring source of fascination for those who come to 
peer down its sloping chasms. One of the dam's Art Deco monuments
is inscribed with a line that seems particularly compelling: "Inspired by
a vision of  lonely lands made fruitful."

The builders of the dam could never have envisioned the full reach
of  their efforts—Jet Skis buzzing around Lake Mead, pirate ships
waging war nightly—but the lonely land of Las Vegas has indeed 
been made fruitful: Along with Reno, the city represents more than
95 percent of Nevada's economy. These two cities, meanwhile, 
use less than 10 percent of the state's water; the bulk is used by 
upstate farmers. If it seems extravagant and otherworldly to put a 
fountain in  the middle of the desert, it seems doubly so to plant 
alfalfa fields. Agriculture was more top-of-mind to the builders of
the Hoover Dam than casinos, but it is the latter that has proven 
more fruitful.

The complex fountains at the Bellagio are a kind of Hoover Dam
of their time, but the water is moved and manipulated for entertainment
purposes. Yet both inspire in their own way. The parallels become
clear as I walk with the Bellagio's "front-feature manager," Jimmy
Karr, through a warren of underground passageways, all smooth 
tile and cool air, leading into rooms filled with giant cylindrical air 
compressors running at earplug level. This is the hidden infrastructure
of the fountains, and it immediately spurs a memory of the Hoover 
Dam, where Italian marble buffed to a sheen lines the walkways 
carved deep into the earth and where, by chance, the Bellagio's 
feature manager once worked. Nearly 50 people man the fountains, 
including the divers who perform routine maintenance (and retrieve 
the inevitable coins) and the two fountain operators sitting high in a 
watchtower over the lake, where they monitor wind trackers to 
calibrate the height of the jets.

The Bellagio's fountain, like most others, marries hydraulic technology
and orchestrated form. Its creator, Los Angeles-based Water 
Entertainment Technology (WET) Design, has taken the typology 
a step further and has gained a reputation for atypical statements: 
WET's fountains, often so minimalist as to make water itself a 
sculptural element,  use an arsenal of patented devices, ranging 
from "nanoshooters" to "water irises" that spit out popcorn-like 
globules of water or generate circular waves. Many of WET's 
fountians rely on the principle of axisymmetric laminar fluid flow, 
which, as WET president Mark Fuller explains, is most easily 
described as the moment just before a faucet is turned off and the
water becomes like a thin rod of glass. "Every single particle of 
water in that stream is flowing at the same speed and is exactly 
parallel to every other," says Fuller. "It's like a group of people 
in a military parade all marching down the street in lockstep." 
When applied to fountain scale, the laminar principle creates 
ultrasmooth water flows. The flows look from afar more like 
parabolic glass hoops than liquid, although closer inspection 
reveals that they are indeed in motion.

WET's other innovation was to introduce compressed air into 
fountain technology. Under the traditional systems of pipes or 
pumps, a fountain such as the Bellagio's would be almost unthinkable
in terms of cost, due to the size of its infrastructure. It would also be 
difficult to obtain the 240-foot heights to which the SuperShooters
at the Bellagio can send what Fuller calls a "missile" of water into 
the sky.

The Bellagio fountain fits right in to the  Las Vegas landscape: Where
else would you hear someone talking about "choreographing the lake"?
Water, infused with light and sound, is a new medium entirely, capable
of being molded into dance or into pure sculptural form.

Pedestrians on the Strip never see the compressors churning away
or the James Bond-like service entrance, where inflatable rafts with
out-board motors sit ready for frogmen. What they do get is the 
entirely unexpected experience of moving from an arid patch of 
sidewalk to the lakeside stone railings of the Bellagio, where they
can stand under the shade of trees and catch the occasional mist 
of a falling geyser. It is an utter invention, of course, a spectacle as 
artificial as anything in Vegas, but because it is water, it retains an 
elemental wholeness. The effect of watching the water swoop in 
gentle arcs and thrust in staccato bursts to accompanyhing music 
is virtually transcendent: The desert seems very far away.