Casinos in Other People's Buildings

The purpose-built casino is a recent idea and never the only one. Across this archive, gaming floors turn up inside a department store, a shipyard site, a watch factory's plot and a landmarked banking hall — and in each case the existing building did something to the design that no brief could have asked for.

The department store

Macau's Oceanus, in A Better Bubble: Steelman's design transformed a former department store with an exterior of irregular shapes contained by an innovative membrane, giving the visual impression of the building being enveloped in blue bubbles.

Retail is the easiest conversion in the building stock — deep plates, high floor-to-floor, good vertical circulation, loading already solved. The difficulty is the outside. A department store has no face worth keeping, so the money goes on a new envelope, which is exactly where it went here.

The landmark

The opposite case is a building whose face is the whole asset. Let It Rock describes a team passionate about preserving and enhancing the original neoclassical and Art Deco style of this building inside and out: decorative plaster details on columns and ceiling beams were restored and windows long covered were once again exposed, along with original railings and grand vestibules… including the original ornate floor-to-ceiling columns, which stand nearly 22 feet tall.

Twenty-two-foot columns on a gaming floor are not a gift. They fix the slot layout, they break sight lines, and they cannot move. What they buy is a room no competitor can build — and a theme with a documented provenance. See theming didn't die, it got specific.

The site, when the building is gone

Sometimes the inheritance is only a history. Heart of the City describes the Grand Victoria in Elgin, Illinois, at the site of the former Elgin Watch Factory, as an example of designing to the site: The factory is long gone, but in fitting tribute to its past, the property's land-based pavilion is characterized by a giant clock hanging from the atrium ceiling.

One object, one reference, no pastiche. That is the discipline the archive rewards. Interesting Interiors states the ambition behind it in one line: Creating a space that reflects a sense of place is the ultimate goal of Cleo Design.

Reuse of a casino by a casino

The most common conversion in the archive is not industrial at all — it is one operator's property becoming another's. Golden Transformation: The $150 million renovation of the former Trump Marina and Hotel in Atlantic City has added new luster to the city's waterfront — the luster of gold. Bergman Walls & Associates' profile locates a development on the former El Rancho and Algiers casinos' 24.5 acre site. Spurred to Success notes Harrah's Chester was built from the ground up on the site of the former Sun Shipyards.

Rebranding an existing casino is harder than it looks, because the plan encodes the previous operator's assumptions about who was coming and what they wanted. Everything else can be refinished; the circulation cannot.

What reuse actually costs

The archive's renovation reporting supplies the frame. The $50 Million Budget starts by surveying unused, non-revenue-generating space — which in an old building is most of it. The predictable overruns are the ones that live behind finishes: structure with unknown capacity, services with no as-builts, hazardous materials, floor-to-floor heights that will not take modern ductwork, and accessibility upgrades triggered the moment work starts.

Against that, four real savings: the structure exists, the envelope exists, the entitlement is usually easier, and — in the landmarked cases — the theme comes free and cannot be copied.

When reuse is the wrong answer

When the plan cannot be made to work. A casino needs a deep, column-tolerant plate with a controllable perimeter, a cage and count route that never crosses guests, a loading dock, kitchen risers and a mechanical plant sized for continuous ventilation. A building that cannot accommodate the back of house cannot accommodate the casino, however handsome the front. That is the same conclusion the archive reaches about food and beverage — see when the restaurant started paying the rent — and it is not a coincidence.