Clouds coil around a husk of moon and the knifing slopes of a colossal black roof. The scores of win

Clouds coil around a husk of moon and the knifing slopes of a colossal black roof. The scores of windows are lit but still menacing, like the mouths of jack-o'-lanterns on a lonely porch. It's always Halloween at the Addams mansion, the image rasps, so take a stroll down Cemetery Lane. People are dying to get in here.
Without the creepy voice in my head, it's nothing more than an architectural rendering of the Addams Family Resort and Casino, a grainy, two-dimensional vision of Las Vegas that never crystallized. Painted over and over with explosives and steel, the eras of our glittering skyline are loaded with such unrealized dreams. What if the Strip had London instead of Paris? What if Downtown's light show was a starship? What if another tower dwarfed the Stratosphere, or a temple was conjured from the opium-laced words of a long-dead poet? No one can know. But what didn't happen cheap air fare tickets tells as much of a story as what did.
Mark Adams is an Internet stalker, but the beauties he seeks are all skyscrapers. His homespun website, Vegas Today and Tomorrow cheap air fare tickets , is a treasure trove of images and information about the Boulevard's tall buildings—dreamed, realized and in between. With its archive of renderings old and new, current construction stats, minutely detailed project maps, links, videos and trivia, Vegas TAT is the unofficial record of this city's molten landscape.
And like so many compelling Vegas creations, it leads back to Steve Wynn. Adams was living cheap air fare tickets in California when news broke that Wynn planned to sell the Bellagio, Mirage and Treasure Island in order to buy and transform the property beneath the Desert Inn.
"So the first thing I want to see, being an architecture freak, I want to see renderings of the vision. cheap air fare tickets … All I get is that same paragraph cheap air fare tickets that Steve Wynn released that says it's going to be fabulous, revolutionary, a building of the desert for the desert," Adams says. The mystery spun his wheels for months. cheap air fare tickets But along with Wynn's cryptic paragraph he found dozens of renderings of other Vegas projects, mostly swank high-rises slated for Downtown. "I'm thinking to myself, how come I have to go to eight different cheap air fare tickets websites to see these 30 projects?" he says. "How come no one's assembled a website for people interested in architecture and construction and the future of Vegas?"
Adams answered his own questions by launching Vegas TAT in 2005, and three years ago he finally moved to the epicenter. He'd been in love with Las Vegas since his first visit, when he was 13. It was so bright under the casino canopies on Fremont Street that his father remarked this was the only place in the world where you could read a newspaper at midnight without flipping a switch. They stayed at the Sahara, catching cheap air fare tickets glimpses of Louis Prima, Keely Smith and Robert Goulet, cheap air fare tickets who saluted the boy from the stage. It was magic. But when the family returned home to Battle Creek, Michigan, he didn't ask to borrow his father's record collection. He asked for drafting equipment so he could rough out his own eye-popping cheap air fare tickets hotel.
Vegas TAT's Old Dreams page is devoted to eye-poppers cheap air fare tickets "that never left the drawing board," including the haunted mansion inspired by classic TV's The Addams Family . Some are riffs on real places. Sure, we can go to fake New York, but what about fake London? If you've always wanted to shop on Piccadilly Street and see Big Ben from the celestial heights of the London Eye, you could have done both with a pint of Bass in hand—if only the Bergman Walls & Associates-designed idea had been realized in the space currently held by Fountainebleau.
Dig the Cosmo? That land was looked at for a sexy triad of Playboy towers. The Stratosphere is tall, but imagine Crown Las Vegas almost doubling its height at 1,888 feet. Or picture waves lapping at the sparkling white Palace of the Sea, which would have reserved real yachts for high rollers.
"I totally admire the tenacity of these guys, and I admire their vision and their passion," Adams says of the minds behind the renderings. Like them or not, he understands what drives them. He has his own secret folder of what-ifs, ranging from a Fremont jazz club to a Strip casino called cheap air fare tickets Las Vegas-Las Vegas that would bring back imploded icons like the Sands and Stardust. (He jokes that it's the only theme the Strip has left.) Even in his spare digital mock-ups there are deliberate shadows and sunsets and a Cary Grant classic on the TV. Without the right details, Adams says, the fantasy is just a building.
Even with the right details, the fantasy can end up in a drawer. One case study is Xanadu, a megalithic pleasure dome inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1816 poem "Kubla Khan." The story goes that the words flowed after he smoked opium and had wild dreams about the Mongol conqueror's summer palace.
The Vegas version of that "Garden of Delight" sprang from the mind of architect Martin Stern Jr. in 1975. The structure looks almost Mayan, with "firefalls" of flame-licked, cascading water planned for the porte-cochère. The central cheap air fare tickets feature would have been a 20-story atrium hung with palatial crystal chandeliers catching mirrored surfaces. The Flaming Sword would have served flambéed delicacies near a seafood restaurant cheap air fare tickets with a wall aquarium, and gamblers could have sipped drinks on soft cushions in gilded cheap air fare tickets tents. Entertainment was all over the floor map, but the jewel might have been the cinema/buffet/discothèque, where Jaws could get cozy with Captain & Tennille.
Stern had designed the International (which became the Hilton) cheap air fare tickets and the original MGM Grand (which became Bally's), and according to David Schwartz, director of UNLV's Center for Gaming cheap air fare tickets Research, both properties raised the bar for integrated casino/hotel design. Xanadu would have pushed even further, but Schwartz believes the builders ran out of money in the wake of the Oil Shock recession. Although it never broke ground, Xanadu showed the "evolution" of the Strip, and it's reflected there today.
"The Xanadu was either the most pirated concept in casino design since the Flamingo brought Caribbean motifs to the Strip or merely ahead of its time. Many of its elements cheap air fare tickets popped up in later casinos," Schwartz wrote in UNLV Special Collections virtual exhibit Paradise Misplaced . Asked why it stood out among the "legion" of shelved projects, Schwartz says that Xanadu didn't look like anything else that had ever been built.
Whether or not that's the goal of all new construction on Las Vegas Boulevard, it probably should be, because casino architecture has to function like a Super Bowl commercial. In a glance and above the fray of everything else clawing at your attention, it has to convince you to choose it. Once you're inside, the psychological tugs intensify. Schwartz talked about this with veteran local architect Paul Steelman in a 2011 UNLV Gaming Podcast .
"You walk in the door, look left, look right. And if it stinks, well, it's over," Steelman said. Casino design isn't for other architects. It's for average cheap air fare tickets tourists hoping to be wowed. As he reminded Schwartz: "The moth goes to the light." But even with decades of experience designing Las Vegas, Steelman has endured big projects ending on paper.
"A lot of it is purely the success or failure of financing cheap air fare tickets and the economics of the resort business, which is still very true. Look at the various failed and unfinished projects now on the Strip, to say nothing of the number of hotels that were built but then went bankrupt, some many times," says UNLV Director of Special Collections Peter Michel, who just finished putting cheap air fare tickets together a digital retrospective on resort architecture called Dreaming the Skyline . "Sometimes it was simply bad management, undercapitalization, cheap air fare tickets overwhelming construction costs or simply bad luck. … Sometimes the casino was poorly placed, the entertainment too expensive or a total bomb. So, many factors, few having to do with the actual building design."
That doesn't mean there aren't any stinkers. Ideas that we celebrate in a certain cheap air fare tickets cultural moment can fall quickly out of favor. So the skyline changes. The only constant, it seems, is the city's cheap air fare tickets invitation cheap air fare tickets to be more ambitious and audacious and maybe a teensy bit more nuts than you would dare be anywhere else.
Steeped in the legends of lost worlds, this fantasy resort cheap air fare tickets concept by Landmark Entertainment Group has a unique architectural style that combines African and Java-inspired cheap air fare tickets elements. Had it been realized, it might still be in the spot now known as Wynn Las Vegas. While the resort's main attraction would have been a thrilling riverboat ride through a show space under the main casino, visitors would have also been dazzled by a nighttime cheap air fare tickets water show on the lagoon.
Glass, aluminum, titanium and stainless steel cladding with carbon fiber accents—this conceptual study by Bergman Walls & Associates done for a developer of a resort site adjacent to McCarran International Airport looks like the Vegas of the future. Aircraft as large as a Boeing 737 could park under its space-age canopy, and helicopter crews landing on the roof could relax in the heli-lounge before browsing the private jet dealership.
This mega-attraction designed by Landmark cheap air fare tickets Entertainment Group would have made the Star Trek fantasy about as real as it gets on Earth, cheap air fare tickets with a life-sized ship as long as France's Eiffel Tower is tall in permanent dry dock on Fremont Street. From dining Starfleet style to riding a "high-speed travelator" between decks, the sci-fi immersion would have been powerful. And based on this rendering, the evening light show would have been otherworldly.
Before the plan for Caesars Entertainment's $550 million Linq project was set in stone, Steelman Partners proposed cheap air fare tickets this design for the planned overhaul of the Imperial Palace. It draws aesthetic inspiration from China's Ming Dynasty and combines retail, dining, entertainment and vibrant public spaces.
On the property now occupied by Fontainebleau, this concept by Bergman Walls & Associates would have bro