Celebrity Architects - Named For Project CityCenter

MGM Mirage Inc. recently announced a celebrity list of architects for its $5 billion, 66-acre Project CityCenter development along the Las Vegas Strip.

The 18 million-sq.-ft. complex of complex of hotels, residences, shops and casinos is the largest privately financed construction project in the U.S., according to project officials.

Perini Building Co., a unit of Perini Corp., Framingham, Mass., is the general contractor under a guaranteed-maximum-price contract, and Tishman Construction Corp., New York, is the construction manager. Ehrenkrantz, Eckstut & Kuhn Architects, who designed Lower Manhattan's Battery City Park, is the master-plan architect with San Francisco-based Gensler as executive architect.

Situated between the Monte Carlo and Bellagio casino-hotels, the project centers around a 7 million-sq.-ft., 4,000-room hotel-casino designed by Cesar Pelli & Associates Architects, New Haven, Conn., the firm responsible for the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Plans call for two crescent-shaped glass towers connected by a low-rise, containing a 150,000-sq.-ft. casino, 15 to 20 restaurants, and a 2,000-seat theater for a Cirque du Soleil show. HKS Inc., Omaha, Neb. is the architect-of-record.

Rafael Vinoly Architects PC, the New York firm best-known for Philadelphia's Kimmel Center, has designed a curved 400-ft-tall, 1,000-unit hotel-condo building set atop of pylons, while Vancouver-based James KM Cheng's plans entail a twisting 100-unit residential tower. Leo A. Daly, Omaha, Neb., is the architect-of-record for the residential portions.

Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, which was set to design a new stadium for the National Football League's New York Jets, is doing the exterior architecture for a new 400-room, five-star Mandarin hotel with interiors from Tihany Design of New York.

London-based Lord Norman Foster, a Pritzker Prize-winning architect who redesigned the Reichstag, meanwhile, is handling the exterior of another 400-room hotel operated by Andrew Sasson's Light Group, creators of the Light and Caramel nightclubs in Bellagio. Adamson Associates, Toronto, is the architect-of-record for the two non-gaming hotels.

Munch-based Siemens has a $100 million design-build contract for a central plant along with other building and communications technologies. Project CityCenter has a 40-month construction schedule, and is expected to employ up to 7,000 trades. It will create 12,000 permanent positions upon its completion in Nov. 2009.

Construction Underway for Office Building

Construction is underway on the 53,600-sq.-ft., Class-A Parkway Pointe office building being built by Christopher Commercial on a 2.75-acre parcel at the northeast corner of Summerlin Parkway and Town Center Drive.

The two-story, $12.5-million office building will provide tenants with a prime location on a freeway interchange in a master-planned community and will feature high-end telecommunications capabilities and energy efficiency, with upscale interiors and architectural detailing.

The building will accommodate firms requiring anywhere from 1,200 up to 26,500 square feet of contiguous space or up to 53,000 total square feet. The parking ratio is 4.75 spaces per 1,000 square feet of building area, including a subterranean parking garage. Completion of the building could be as early as summer, 2006.