About this item
The Las Vegas Strip has impersonated the Wild West, with saloon doors and wagon wheels; it has decked itself out in midcentury modern sleekness. It has illuminated itself with twenty-story-high neon signs, then junked them. After that came Disney-like theme parks featuring castles and pirates, followed by replicas of Venetian canals, New York skyscrapers, and the Eiffel Tower. (It might be noted that forty-two million people visited Las Vegas in 2015 -- ten million more than visited the real Paris.) More recently, the Strip decided to get classy, with casinos designed by famous architects and zillion-dollar collections of art. Las Vegas became the "implosion capital of the world" as developers, driven by competition, got rid of the old to make way for the new -- offering a non-metaphorical definition of "creative destruction.
About the Author
Stefan Al, is an architect, urban designer, professor and the author of SUPERTALL. As a designer he has worked on masterplans and mixed-use buildings across the globe, including the 2000-feet tall Canton Tower, briefly the world's tallest tower. In addition, he served as an advisor to various city governments and expert to the United Nations High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development. SUPERTALL is about the new generation of skyscrapers - why they're here, how they're made, and what they do to cities and people. Stefan's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and TED Talks. Over the years, he has published eight books on subjects related to architecture and urban design, which have been widely praised. He is committed to train the next generation of designers, having served as a professor at Virginia Tech, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Hong Kong. A native of The Netherlands, he is a licensed architect in New York. He holds a PhD in urban planning from the University of California, Berkeley.
