Celebrity architects recruited for MGM Project CityCenter High Rise Condo Development

When you're George Steinbrenner, you buy the best players you can get for your baseball team. When you're MGM Mirage, you compile a slate of celebrity architects for your Project CityCenter Las Vegas Strip development as they've been lining up superstar architects from around the world to design components of its CityCenter project.

Just as attracting celebrities to purchase units in their condo projects, big-name designers such as Cesar Pelli, Sir Norman Foster, James KM Cheng, Rafael Vinoly and Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates mean big-time business and will certainly add plenty of glitz to the $5 billion, 66-acre project.

Add to that Perini Building as the general contractor, Ehrenkrantz, Eckstut & Kuhn Architects being the master-plan architect, and Tishman Construction as the project manager, Project CityCenter has high hopes of opening by November 2009. And when this 60-story, 4,000 room condo/hotel casino with two 400-room non-gaming hotels, 1,640 luxury condos and 500,000 square feet of retail shops with dining and entertainment options does open, it'll be larger than Rockerfeller Center, SoHo, and Times Square combined! Talk about Manhattanization!

MGM Mirage is banking on an upscale, sophisticated visitor that wants to live and play in a dynamic, urban setting created by big-name architects.

The resumes of these celebrity architects include the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the new stadium design for the National Football League's New York Jets, and the redesign of the Reichstag in Berlin. The architects all share a flair for edgy, kinetic designs that make cultural statements. MGM's roster of celebrity designers adds some high-octane branding power to the development.

We just have to hope they all fair better than George Steinbrenner's Yankees. Let me know if you'd like to be on the interest list for this project.