Las Vegas Tower (Crown Las Vegas), Clark County/SOM

International Development Management (IDM) company, with its base in Austin, Texas, and the investor Christopher F. Milam, promote since months ago a project for building a great hotel tower in Las Vegas outskirts (specifically in Clark County).

The building would be situated in 2600 Las Vegas Boulevard, the great avenue that connects the most known places of the city, as MGM Grand, Venetian, The Mirage, Caesars Palace, Bellagio, etc. It has been design by SOM studio (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill), as a 575m tower, and it is named Las Vegas Tower (from now on LVT).

The building has a Y shaped footprint, and a central core that mixes a circumference and a triangle (similar to the floor plan of Sacyr-Vallehermoso Tower in Madrid). This 3 vertex star shape is the most efficient for “supertall” category buildings, as SOM said, because it shows advantages in illumination, in fact it is an usual shape to be seen in hotel highrises, as well another advantages as efficiency to prevent earthquake damage, and against the wind pushing (we suppose it means resistance, not aerodynamics).

Many of the people and companies that participate in this project are taking a role in Burj Dubai building, under construction nowadays, which will be the highest tower in the world when it is finalised. In fact, the architecture, enginery, security, windtunnel, etc. companies are the same in the two projects.

Similar features buildings, as Burj Dubai, show some difficulties for the commercialization of the last floors, due to a narrowing of them respect to the base, which reduces the usable space. That makes the last floors have to be sold in group.

LVT’s design has been treated with the efficiency in height for the selling of independent unities as the main premise. Saying it of other way, due to the hotel and apartment uses, the customer’s program required to situate rooms and apartments for rent individually in the maximum number of floors, without any prejudice to the corridors, halls or space in rooms.

The tower is divided internally in 3 segments of 60 floors. Each one of these blocks has in their lower parts a hall, for common services, receptions, etc. That way, the tower could house 3 different hotels, with a total number of rooms next to 4000.

The complex completes with a great hall situated at the base of the tower. That hall has been designed by another architecture studio, PSDG in this case, with its HQ in Las Vegas. It will be used as a parking, casino, auditorium, restaurant, and many other complementary uses.

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The building would be situated very close to McCarran airport, but the promoters assure that it does not cause any problems with the approximation or escape routes of that airport. LVT project is in its design phase, and it has a lot of administrative proceedings to surpass yet, before being an approved reality. Any way, the promoters had made their counts, and estimate that if everything goes right, the building could be started at final 2007, and to be finalised in 2011.