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LAS VEGAS: URBAN FUTURE IN A PRESENT CITY
Every huge city is a freestanding world, and summerizes the world in itself, with ethnic, cultural and social differences. It is a mirror for many contradictions between continuous spaces and broken realities, where frictions and incongruities take place. The present becomes future for tomorrow.
Las Vegas, is known as “the capital of entertainment” but it also celebrates itself as the “First city of the 21st century”.
Las Vegas skyline reminds us of movie sets, but this is so fake that is real.
Both Hollywood cinema industry and the Las Vegas Strip show a spectcular mise-en-scène based on archiectural history.
In this almost surreal desert, the idea of city has been transformed, forever.
As the dark hall of the cinema is the "set" where audience can put all problems away for a while entering in a new fictional world; in the same way Las Vegas becomes
a new sort of 3-dimension cinema experience, where every building, every place or square exists to serve entertainment and enjoyment. Architecture is used to celebrate the illusion and the hallucination of the american idea of life as a big show.
The dark night when all the candy-colored buildings are lighted up is the perfect moment to realize that this new El Dorado has much more in common with movies than "Festival Cities" like Cannes, Venice or Berlin. As a matter of fact thanks to its artificiality, thanks to all the copies of many buildings from all over the world (the Rialto Bridge, San Marco Square, the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower, and many others) a tourist walking there can think to be on a movie set, where every inhabitant is just an actor playing a role.
Las Vegas, as Umberto Eco said, is a new kind of magic kingdom of hyper reality where, like in movies, architecture is considered just like an instrument to create great illusions and simulations.
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