Café Vettro Las Vegas, Nevada
Urban density arrived on the sprawling Las Vegas Strip with the construction of City Center. Included in this 67-acre, 18-million-square-foot development are four hotels, a condominium building, a shopping mall, a casino, a convention center, a dozen restaurants, and its own monorail. A major component of City Center is the 4,000-room Aria Resort and Casino, which includes the space that became Café Vettro. While City Center, and the Aria Resort in particular, include outdoor areas serving as parks in this dense setting, these spaces provide only limited respite from the vast extent of enclosed space. The architects immediately recognized that the size and shape of the portion allocated for Café Vettro, with extensive exposure to natural light, offered an opportunity to create an airy, park-like clearing within the Aria's compressed interior. They found design cues in the immense dimensions of the given space — 400 feet long and 35 feet high, offering 18,000 square feet at casino level with an added 8,000 on a mezzanine they would create — with a curved perimeter of curtain wall that admits copious daylight. The fact that the restaurant is approached from the relatively dark, inward-oriented casino inspired them to allude in their design to the natural world not far outside Las Vegas. Arriving from the compression of the casino floor, the restaurant patron is not faced with a conventional door, but with an open passage toward a brighter space, recalling the way daylight plays on the region's ravines. This passage is framed on the left by a sheer concrete plaster wall and on the right by a tiered construction composed of locally collected rocks on blackened steel shelves, seen through sand-blasted glass and back- lighted. Within this opening, a 90-foot-long ramp slopes up toward the greeter's stand, where the full volume of the 560-seat restaurant is revealed. The metaphor for the natural world is maintained throughout with abstract references to the forest. To divide the café's volume into more moderately scaled areas, the architects introduced the restaurant's most distinctive elements, its groupings of internally illuminated tree-like cones composed of stacked green glass discs. The massive concrete columns that march through the space are tinted brown, suggesting trunks of lofty trees. The stairs to the mezzanine rise along the cliff of layered rocks that is seen at the entrance. At night, back lighting can make these masses look almost weightless. Supported on this stony construction is the natural-ledge-like edge of the mezzanine, under which is an arc of relatively secluded booths. A variety of ceiling surfaces and furnishings throughout the restaurant extend the palette of nature-inspired textures and colors.
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