The Las Vegas of the Future Will Include a 'Banana-Shaped' High Rise. Yeah, That's It. Banana-Shaped.
I have to admit, I've spent precious little time in Las Vegas. And I have no recollection of ever eating a banana in my short time there. But unless somehow they ones they import are stiff and veiny with a slight backwards curve and two spheres in a bag at the base, Las Vegas Locally is missing the larger picture here.
Here's how the real estate development firm that has designed Caesar's Phallus here describes it:
Source - This $7.5 billion, six+ years project will be constructed of net zero carbon footprint buildings within their own insular mini-city, featuring automated multi-functional designs, renewable energies from solar/wind/water/kinetic, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, powered by 5G promoting a new approach to Health and Safety within the Built Environment.
Bleutech Park’s mixed-use environment (Live-Learn-Work-Play) features “Sustainable Living”- a cluster of net zero carbon footprint workforce residences. The Park will be home to Ultra-Luxury residential towers, Hotel, Offices (reimagining workspaces of the future), Retail and the tallest Entertainment Tower, redefining the skyline of Las Vegas. Bleutech Park will introduce a new biome to the desert valley as vertical gardens, powered by kinetic energy from footfall, overall contributing to a new sustainable and diversified ecosystem for Las Vegas.
All of which sounds forward thinking, well intentioned, idealistic and environmentally responsible. None of which should distract us from the fact that what Bleutech is thrusting up into the clouds is a 33-story concrete, steel and glass dick.
One thing that has been consistent throughout my journey on this spinning blue marble has been how often my science fiction has gotten things wrong. When I was little I saw Disney's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" and learned that submarine technology didn't exist back when Jules Verne imagined the Nautilus. He dreamed it, and science made them reality. So I assumed that would be true of all the other stuff I was watching. But all the Sci Fi creators got it wrong. In "Star Trek" they're using 2005 flip phones three hundred years from now. "Back to the Future" had us riding around on hoverboards by 2015. "Blade Runner" had us in flying cars by 2019. Aldous Huxley's 1930s novel "Brave New World" had us living in a world where the government controls the populace through drugs, entertainment and tech gadgets. And you don't see that happening.
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The only Sci-Fi of my life that actually got it right were "Escape from New York," where Manhattan is an isolated, locked down, maximum security prison, and "Robocop," where Detroit is an economically depressed, crime-ridden hellscape. Still, neither movie went far enough envisioning how bad the reality would be.
What no visionary ever accurately predicted was that by 2020, our city skylines would be filled with giant, state of the art, architectural sex organs. Something the internet wasted no time reminding Bleutech about.
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That's the future we never saw coming. One where the planners, designers and engineers come up with new, innovative designs to save energy while creating a sustainable, multi-use urban experience? Yes. Absolutely. Where they work out their Freudian issues? No. That one's a surprise. And if they're going to just stop pretending it's about anything else and just finally say, "Fuck it. Let's just build Wang Tower," Vegas seems like the perfect place to do it. So they might as well just go all in on the features.