Hasta La Ideas

Few recent buildings have caused as much of a sensation as the MSG Sphere Las Vegas. Now that the initial hype has died down, Matt Shaw reflects on its significance.

Arriving in Las Vegas around dusk is like reaching an electric oasis. It recalls the days of Route 66, which of course in turn recalls the old west of train hoppers and cowboys. Norman Mailer called it a “jeweled city” with “neon spires”.

The latest electronic jewel is the MSG Sphere, the 112-metre-tall entertainment venue illuminated on the outside by 1.2 million LED pucks, and on the inside housing a 15,000-square-metre LED “immersive surface”, or a huge, curved IMAX screen. Its interior screen is more immersive than IMAX, but the theatre seating has many features of 4DX, such as individualised audio, vibrating seats and pipes in the floor that can simulate steam, rain or even various smells.

After experiencing it first-hand, I can say it wildly exceeded my expectations

Billed as the future of entertainment, the Sphere recently turned one year old – a great time to assess its impact beyond the image of a giant emoji on the Strip, especially as we have now seen several different musical acts utilise the cutting-edge technology.

I saw the band Dead and Company perform as part of their summer-long residency, “Dead Forever”. They are led by two original members of the Grateful Dead – known for their electrified, psychedelic take on American folk music, blues, and bluegrass – along with John Mayer and several other younger musicians.

From a distance, I found the Sphere (and seeing the Dead there) hilarious. However, after experiencing it first-hand, I can say it wildly exceeded my expectations. Architecturally, the building is so present in the experience of the show that it is impossible to ignore.

It is a direct experience of architecture in its fullest sense – physically, but also conceptually. While the primitive form of a sphere is simple, it becomes less familiar at such a grand scale. The structure is visible through the screen before it is lit up, reminding you that this is a unique experience of a building.

Entering the upper level sections through short tunnels, visitors are greeted by a massive screen that is nothing short of sublime. David Nye notes in American Technological Sublime that these monumental feats of American technological progress serve to define what America is as a socially diverse society, connected through a shared human and emotional understanding of these technological feats.

“The sublime encounter leaves subjects too deeply moved to reflect on the historicity of their encounter,” he writes. “Sublimity seems not a social construction but a unique and precious encounter with reality.”

It is like being inside your phone or TV

At the Sphere, building and screen become one. It is like being inside your phone or TV.

Robert Venturi foreshadowed this in his 1996 book Iconography and Electronics Upon a Generic Architecture. “Jumbotrons atop buildings in Tokyo and Osaka can, along with temple hieroglyphics and mosaic iconography, work as precedent for a generic architecture employing video display systems – where the sparkle of pixels can parallel the sparkle of tesserae and LED can become the mosaics of today.”

The Sphere has new technology, but it is fundamentally still a live music venue, with lobby, escalators, and concessions that are organised like a traditional stadium. There is still a shared experience. We do not leave our bodies or social interactions behind. There is still a ritual in going to the venue, rather than putting on a headset.

This shared experience is crucial to the Sphere’s success. Rather than simply becoming a virtual architecture or a fancy movie theatre, the live-performance component of the venue – the hybrid experience – transcends a simple virtual architecture, which could quickly devolve into simple gimmick or worse, metaverse-style digital slop.

Like the Dead’s Americana, the Sphere inhabits multiple narratives by harmonising and actualising the mythologies of the American west: digital technology, psychedelia, boomer culture, hippy radicalism, as well as modernist development and urban planning.

It is the final form of the 20th-century American city. It’s as if all of 20th-century American history – and urbanism – has been culminating into this one moment. Several dusty American highways of the mind break from the street grid, electrify, and coalesce into a spinning explosion reaching toward the sky, or the cloud.

The Sphere is the avant-garde of frontier urbanism

Vegas has undergone several transformations, almost always at the forefront of American urbanism. The original Strip was founded outside of the city so as to avoid taxes and planning measures such as the Las Vegas street grid. It was an early American free trade Zone, and has been ever since.

In the 1980s gambling was legalised in other places, including on many Native American reservations and cities like Atlantic City, New Jersey. Vegas responded by offering more family-friendly attractions, and the town became Disneyfied.

In the 2000s, the town took a luxury turn, with more subdued, less thematic resorts like the Wynn and Cosmopolitan cropping up, bringing with them a rash of glass boxes along the Strip. This era of Manhattanisation brought with it pedestrianisation and traffic.

The current era is one of Dubai-like spectacles, such as an NFL stadium, an F1 track, a ferris wheel, and the Sphere. Today, the frontier mentality that built Vegas is now global, incorporating the fringes of spectacle from around the world.

The Sphere is the avant-garde of frontier urbanism, but in this 21st century sense. It will almost certainly be exported around the world, and will likely not be welcomed to traditional city centres, as was the case in London. Spheres will likely be located on the industrial periphery, where light pollution is not an issue.

Las Vegas has always accepted the extraordinary and has always been open to new ideas and the frontiers of technological progress. From the canals of the Venetian to the volcano at the Mirage, the Sphere represents just one in a lineage of this forward-thinking entertainment tech.

We now experience the city by scrolling, hopping on Google Maps or in Uber

It also extends the project of American radical architecture of the 1960s counterculture. Domes were one of the most common forms of building, from Drop City to Pacific High School, an experimental high school in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Domes encapsulated what curator Andrew Baulvelt describes as “the tensions between the modern, characterised as universal, timeless, rational, and progressive, and its countercultural other, which adopts a more local, timely, emotive, and often irreverent and radical disposition”.

Most of these domes were simple constructions. Only radical visionary experiments like Buckminster Fuller’s Geoscope (and World Game), or Stan Van Der Beek’s Movie-drome in the upstate New York woods dreamed of the immersive collapse of building and media, both of which foreshadowed our networked present.

Perhaps Silicon Valley’s most impactful contribution to the city is the total reorientation of our urban experience toward the screen, rather than the signages that defined Venturi’s and Denise Scott Brown’s old Vegas highway strip. We now experience the city by scrolling, hopping on Google Maps or in Uber – it is a hybrid of physical structures and digital media.

But we best not submit fully, or we may lose ourselves and the physical space that makes us human. As Venturi said: “Viva virtual architecture, almost.”

Matt Shaw is a New York-based architecture author, editor and curator. He is a contributing editor for The Architect’s Newspaper and teaches at UPenn, Indiana University, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. His recent book with photographer Iwan Baan, American Modern: Architecture and Community in Columbus, Indiana, is published by Monacelli Press (2024). The author thanks Michael Green and Mark David Major for their input on this article.

The photo is by Steve Spatafore via Shutterstock.

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