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Decades ago, few people in the gaming industry pondered the environmental consequences of drawing millions of people to gamble 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
As gaming grew beyond Nevada’s borders, technology evolved, and it became possible to design sophisticated, sustainable casinos that conserve energy and resources while entertaining the masses.
Architecture and interior design are an integral part of crafting green resorts; designers contribute their knowledge of renewable resources and energy efficiency to casino operators, who must then decide if their bottom line allows for sustainable practices. Many gaming operators have found that the return on investment for environmental consciousness is high enough to justify the initial expenditures. As the world’s consumers become more conscientious of protecting the earth and technology moves into the future, casino designers continue to present their visions of sustainable resorts.
Green Standards
As environmental sustainability has pervaded the public consciousness, consumers are expecting businesses to reduce their carbon footprints. The hospitality industry is no exception.
Founded in 1998, the U.S. Green Building Council created the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification process as a professional standard for energy efficiency and environmental design. Potential LEED candidates are awarded points in seven categories: sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, indoor environmental quality, innovation in design and regional priority. The regional category was created for projects to earn points by addressing important environmental issues in their areas. LEED-certified projects can earn the base certification, or silver, gold or platinum standings.
Persuading casino operators to upgrade their existing buildings according to LEED standards, or to build new resorts with green materials, is the job of architects, who must present a range of options from which developers can choose. Design firm Cuningham Group, which counts the Cherokee Indians’ Harrah’s Hotel and Casino in North Carolina and the Red Hawk Casino in California as two of its green projects, offers no-cost, low-cost, moderate-cost and expensive-cost sustainable design choices to its clients.
“From an interior standpoint, a lot of times it’s explaining what the return on investment might be on switching from a non-green product to a green product,” says Michele Espeland, head of interiors at Cuningham Group. “A lot of times, square-foot costs get misconstrued when you look at a certain material versus another material, and one is and one isn’t renewable or with recycled content, but there’s always an ROI involved in that. We have to be educated on how to explain that and get them to understand that it’s not just the initial cost.”
Sustainable materials are often associated with high costs, but Jon Sparer, principal of YWS Architects, says the 30 percent premiums that were once quoted to casino clients are no longer applicable. Costs have declined in recent years, and as LEED standards become more common, Sparer thinks building codes are going to evolve to reflect sustainable methods.
Casino design projects are eligible for LEED certification, though buildings that allow smoking indoors—as casinos in many jurisdictions, including Nevada, do—cannot obtain LEED certification. Casinos that are designed according to LEED standards, such as Las Vegas Sands’ Palazzo and MGM Mirage’s Aria Resort & Casino at CityCenter, have obtained certification for their hotels, but not their gaming floors.
“It’s a prerequisite for LEED certification that you can’t have smoking in the building,” Sparer says. “Anywhere where you can have smoking in casinos, that’s the biggest hurdle with the clients, with the owners of casinos. They know if they can’t have smoking in their casino, it’s a huge hit on the bottom line. If they’re allowed to have smoking in a casino, they’re absolutely going to demand that we design a building with smoking, which of course knocks you off for LEED certification.”
Aria garnered LEED gold certification despite its smoker-friendly gaming floor due to a separate ventilation system that filters smoky air and a displacement floor system that pushes air up instead of cooling from the ceiling down. These technological innovations are the tip of the iceberg for CityCenter, the gaming world’s leading green resort.
CityCenter’s Sustainability
It began with the Palazzo’s opening on the Las Vegas Strip in April 2008. Certified LEED silver by the U.S. Green Building Council, the resort was the largest green building in the world. The Palazzo incorporated solar-powered swimming pools, energy-efficient irrigation and a structure made of largely recycled steel. The resort was on the forefront of sustainable architecture.
Then CityCenter opened in December 2009 and changed the game of sustainable design. Never before had such an expansive project been designed to have a minimal effect on the environment.
Executive architect Gensler, a firm that has a reputation for its commitment to environmental sustainability, oversaw the design of CityCenter, and when the meta-resort opened, it garnered gold LEED certifications for Aria Resort & Casino, Vdara Hotel & Spa, Mandarin Oriental, the Crystals retail complex and the two Veer Towers. The Harmon Hotel is also expected to pursue LEED certification when it opens.
CityCenter’s architects combined a variety of design techniques to lessen the resort’s carbon footprint. From installing low-flow showerheads and sourcing wood from Forest Stewardship Council-approved forests to constructing a natural gas plant on-site and designing slot machine bases as air conditioning units, techniques both standard and groundbreaking were deployed in an effort to make the project less detrimental to the environment.
In a rare move for the city that destroys historical relics to make way for the future, CityCenter also incorporated 80 percent of the materials from the imploded Boardwalk Hotel into its structure, or arranged to have them reused in other places.
“This is a collection of buildings that will change the way we look at buildings,” S. Richard Fedrizzi, CEO and founder of the U.S. Green Building Council, said in a statement when the LEED certifications were announced. “We honestly believe these buildings will change the world. CityCenter was developed with a sense of purpose and quality and will inspire those around the world.”
It remains to be seen if CityCenter has changed the world, but its commitment to sustainable architecture presents a large-scale model for future resorts to follow.
Cut Costs, Save Environment
Two main areas where architectural input is crucial in designing sustainable casino resorts are lighting and heating/cooling. Casinos run up incredible energy costs in these two areas, and designers can provide innovative and energy-efficient alternatives to standard lighting and heating/cooling practices.
While CityCenter has set the bar with its displacement floor system, which cools from the ground up rather than from the ceiling down, where cool air is wasted, designers have presented ways for casino operators to heat and cool their resorts more efficiently.
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“Mechanical systems are oftentimes replaced to improve the indoor air quality,” says Cuningham Group principal architect John Culligan. “Most casinos basically bring in 100 percent outside air. It only cycles through once and then it’s exhausted out. That’s tremendously inefficient, so what happens is you use an energy recovery wheel, so that as the hot or cool air comes back through the system, the energy is absorbed in the wheel, and that helps preheat or pre-cool the air coming into the facility, so that it proves a much better indoor air quality in an energy-efficient manner.”
YWS Architects’ Sparer prefers contemporary architecture, with exposed finishes and expansive glass windows, but says it is challenging to design for both aesthetic and sustainable functions.
“You get really limited on the area of vision glass you can have in the hotel room,” Sparer says. “Where we’d like to have just walls of glass, especially when a room would have a good view, you just can’t do that with an LEED-certified building because of the energy that you lose through the glass. That’s a big challenge.”
CityCenter spared no cost for combining energy efficiency and aesthetic appeal; according to the Wall Street Journal, MGM Mirage allowed designer Helmut Jahn to use a ceramic coating to block heat from the sun on the glass windows of the condominiums at Veer Towers. The coating was an expensive option, but Jahn preferred that to other heat-blocking alternatives, and MGM obliged.
Natural light’s infusion of heat during summer months can increase energy costs, as can the wrong type of artificial lighting. Casinos once used incandescent bulbs, which evolved to fluorescent bulbs, and the latest trend is LED lighting.
“Lighting is a very big piece,” Sparer says. “We’ve really seen the advent of LED lights take over, especially in the casinos, which is terrific. They’re low-energy; they produce very little heat or no heat. The electrical systems get smaller because of the amount of electricity the LED lights take to run. The problem is they’re much more expensive going in. The engineering departments in the casinos absolutely love the LED lights because their life is 100 times more than the typical incandescent light. They’ve accepted it more because it’s a maintenance rather than an LEED component, but secondarily they’re saving a lot of money on their electric bills.”
Aside from LED bulbs, architects are designing lighting schemes that are more efficient while also satisfying the casino customer.
“In the Harrah’s Cherokee hotel, we implemented a one-off button, so when you’re leaving the room, you can just push this button and it’ll turn every light in the room off,” Espeland says. “That’s really beneficial to this room, because it’s a very highly designed room. The lighting is complicated; there’s accent lighting, art lighting, ambient lighting. They like that because they can set the mood depending on the time of day that the guest is arriving, so when the guest is leaving, they don’t have to run around the room and try to find all the switches, just one button when they leave and they can just turn everything off.”
Designing Spaces
When designing a resort, architects must consider the surrounding environment. Cuningham Group has experience designing regional casinos, and Culligan says the firm starts with three basic principles: site, shelter and comfort.
“There are differences in regions, but when you start with a project and you start with a site, we want to minimize the building footprint, maximize open space,” he says. “On that particular project—Harrah’s Cherokee—we did an awful lot, because it was a very tight site with mountains surrounding it and a creek running through it. It was a long, linear site.
“Storm water management was a huge element of sustainability because we needed to reduce water runoff and downstream erosion of the existing creek and beyond. As part of that, we specified pervious concrete and brick for the road system. The benefits of that, obviously, are that the water percolates through it rather than running off on asphalt. Basically that will recharge the ground water through infiltration.”
The exterior of the Harrah’s Cherokee property also reflects Cuningham Group’s commitment to innovative sustainable design.
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“We also created a half-acre green porte-cochere roof, which basically helps reduce the heat island effect—added heat on the site,” Culligan says. “It had kind of a low-growth, pre-planted sedum roof to help reduce runoff. From a design perspective, the structure—as with the rest of the roofs—they’re curved to reflect the Smoky Mountains that surround the property. As you’re coming in, you can see the grass roof on the porte-cochere that is supposed to reflect the rolling hills of the surrounding areas. That was an opportunity where the design and sustainable strategy worked very hand in hand, as they always do.”
Cuningham Group also designed the Isleta Pueblo’s Isleta Casino & Resort in Albuquerque, New Mexico—now known as Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Albuquerque—which presented its own set of unique challenges.
“We provided site walls around the property at Isleta to control the wind-swept sand to protect the buildings, doors, windows, mechanical equipment—which clogged very easily—the pool, the spa,” Culligan says.
Resorts around the world, from the mountain ranges of America to the shores of China, are recognizing the need for environmental consciousness in all aspects of business, including design. As more and more casino operators are choosing to upgrade their projects according to green standards, Sparer says the time may soon come when building codes will mandate sustainability and efficiency.
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“I think the understanding, the sophistication and the awareness that everybody has now, just as an owner and as a consumer, as architects, as builders, I think it’s only going to get more and more responsible in the design and construction of all buildings, especially now that we see what’s happening in the Gulf Coast,” Sparer says. “We’re really hammered pretty strong as a people on what the environment is all about and that we all need to step up and do everything we can to protect it.
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“For the owners, when they see their electric bills go down and they see the life of lights getting longer, they see the maintenance costs go down for changing out LED lights, that’s their bottom line. That’s a big motivator for owners. The future of green design is going to be right in the building department, in the building codes. It’s going to be the way you have to design and you have to build because it’s going to be required. It’s a good thing.”