Hasta La Ideas

Though it’s been well known that Norman Foster‘s Harmon Hotel, a large tower connected to the multi-billion, pedestrian-shooing CityCenter complex in Las Vegas, had seemingly long ago seen the nail driven deeply into its coffin, it appears that it’s been made official this week. You might recall that the troubles started back in 2009, partially due to the crumbling of the world’s finances, but also because it had been discovered that there were numerous construction errors (for example: 15 floors were found to have wrongly installed rebar). Still trying to finish the project, the hotel was cut from a planned 49 stories to just 28. That trimming, it turns out, would be just the start of the project’s collapse. From that point forward, the building’s owners, MGM, got into an all out war with the company it claims was responsible for all of the construction problems, Perini Building (who in turn were already suing MGM for not paying them). And that’s just a sliver of the issues that have plagued the project and MGM has stated that it’s ready to demolish the Harmon as early as next year. It seems as though that might now be a good option, as the Las Vegas Review-Journal writes that an engineering firm was hired by MGM to look at the structure of the building, to get a sense of just how bad things are. And bad they most certainly were. Apparently so bad are the problems that it seems demolition is really the only option. Here’s a bit:

“The construction defects in the tower observed to date are so pervasive and varied in character that it is not possible to quickly implement a temporary or permanent repair to remediate the defects, or even determine whether such repairs can be performed.”

In the letter, Ekwueme said that if a code-level earthquake were to take place, “it is likely that critical structural members in the tower will fail and become incapable of supporting gravity loads, leading to a partial or complete collapse of the tower.”

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