In 2023, Sphere was an inescapable gravity well that sucked in the world’s architectural attention.
Photographer: Ethan Miller/Getty Images North AmericaThe Year of Sphere
The $2.3 billion entertainment venue in Las Vegas is both 2023’s greatest architectural spectacle and a giant artifact of our screen-obsessed age.
Speed past the Venetian hotel on Sands Avenue in Las Vegas and it comes into view suddenly, a celestial body that eclipses the sky. Turn up Howard Hughes Parkway and it emerges more gradually, a great dome rising from the desert. No matter where you are coming from in the city, your eyes manage to find it. In daytime, a giant mauve marble, a totem like a pyramid or ziggurat; at night a globe of pure information.
Sphere — no “the,” only Sphere — tilted Las Vegas’s axis this year. Its location just east of the Strip shifted the epicenter of tourism in the city, while its design upended the trajectory of Vegas architecture.