Sphere, designed by Populous, opened in Las Vegas in October 2023.
“You humans are so lucky with all of your senses,” said a rubber-faced android to a group of transfixed onlookers. It was an early October night in Las Vegas, and five clones of a robot named Aura were holding court among thousands of people milling about the atrium of the recently opened Sphere. From glowing pedestals spaced around the floor, some delivered scripted explanations of the state-of-the-art venue, while others lured visitors into small talk, like strange humanoid ambassadors of this fresh spectacle just off the Strip. The Aura with the sense envy was speaking to a human conversation partner who stood attentively with a phone held to her sternum, mirroring the camera implanted in the bot’s chest. “I see you are filming me,” Aura went on in a faltering droid tone, “but maybe we could take a selfie?”
Uncanny and unignorable, the Auras were only some of several cutting-edge technologies paraded as part of a ticketed event debuting that night called the Sphere Experience. Though Sphere, which eschews the definite article, had been inaugurated by rock ’n’ roll a week earlier when U2 kicked off its monthslong residency at the venue, the Sphere Experience is billed as “a new genre of live entertainment that will transform the shared experience and put Sphere’s 22nd century immersive technologies on full display.” Really, it is a demonstration event for the new theater, with its 160,000-square-foot LED screen that curves over the top and around the sides of the seating bowl. To showcase their huge screen, the owners of Sphere commissioned a fifty-minute film by Darren Aronofsky, Postcard from Earth. As a prelude to the film, sixty languid minutes elapse between showtime and the screening, compelling visitors to wander the atrium and peruse the Auras and other blinking enticements. Altogether, the disjointed two-hour “experience” recalls a form decidedly of the previous century; it comes off rather like a visit to an expo pavilion, shot through with glitzy technopositivism.
Admittedly, the tech is impressive. Haptic feedback equipment installed on 10,000 of the 18,500 seats enables them to vibrate with the action, further engrossing viewers in footage captured by an 18K-resolution fish-eye camera that was developed specially to shoot images for the wraparound screen (the size of four football fields, they say). Concealed speakers manipulate audio beams to deliver precise sound throughout the sweeping theater; I know this because an Aura told me in a demonstration of the process before the movie. Indeed, through Aura, the building is conspicuously eager to exhibit itself: “You might have heard sound systems before at other nonspherical venues, but you have never experienced anything like this.”
Tickets for the Sphere Experience range from $69 to $249. The price is typical for a Vegas show, but it begs speculation about whether the supplementary techno flourishes that compose the event’s first half are there not only to prime the audience for the movie (would they recognize cutting-edge theater wizardry if they weren’t told about it first?) but also to pad out its compact runtime. In the dimly lit atrium, artwork consists of holographic projections and a sculpture of nearly a hundred large discs hung in a sinuous array that would be at home in an airport, forgettable accoutrements in this vertical lobby, which has the overall quality of knockoff Fuksas. Above a darkly polished floor, multiple levels of overlapping, undulated balconies are trimmed out in moody, color-changing LEDs to the effect of the Beverly Center with the lights turned down. That’s the good part. The involuted floorplates are supported by poorly considered chunky columns, and at the midpoint of the oblong hall, scissored escalators gracelessly break the ribbon of balconies, cheapening the effect of all those curves overhead into just surfaces for the yawn-inducing accent lights. Lacking the characteristic relish of a Sin City interior, the atrium manages to be both garish and uninteresting. But the glaring miss by the building’s architects, the global stadium and arena firm Populous, was to leave its spherical form totally absent here—neither the illuminated exoskeleton nor the curved envelope within are perceptible.
To contrast Dolan’s sphere with Boullée’s, a canonical work of utopian architecture, seems a tempting disciplinary reading of a kind of dystopian, screen-based immersion and mimesis at play in Las Vegas. But this poignant historical parallel doesn’t engage enough with the building as it really is: an operating entertainment venue built for tourists.
At one end of the hall, guests can wait in line to go through a full-body scanner that generates their digital avatars. The scanner, which resembles something from a TSA checkpoint, may give pause to anyone familiar with the tactics of Madison Square Garden Entertainment, owner of Sphere and other notable venues including Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall. Helmed by New York cable scion James Dolan, the company has notoriously employed facial recognition technology at its venues to deny entry to unwanted visitors, namely lawyers at firms involved in litigation against it. But for anyone perturbed by such dubious correlates to the touted “22nd century technology,” at least there are also concessions, like the proverbial $22 beer.
To finally transit from the glowing atrium to the theater beyond is to squeeze through narrow vomitoria into a sharply raked bowl. Seating is packed tightly under the domed screen, which soars up from the floor at the front of the theater. There, a performance stage is raised above an area sized for 1,500 standing guests. For the film, however, the theater’s 20,000-person capacity is diminished to 5,000, with the audience limited to seats in the three center sections (likely to avoid suboptimal vantage points on the flanks).
Against the blustery claims to novelty made by Sphere’s promoters, commentators have noted many clear precedents, the most obvious of which might be Étienne-Louis Boullée’s unbuilt 1784 Cenotaph for Isaac Newtown, a monumental hollow sphere pierced with small openings that would map the cosmos within its 500-foot diameter interior void. To contrast Dolan’s sphere with Boullée’s, a canonical work of utopian architecture, seems a tempting disciplinary reading of a kind of dystopian, screen-based immersion and mimesis at play in Las Vegas. But this poignant historical parallel doesn’t engage enough with the building as it really is: an operating entertainment venue built for tourists.
In extensive coverage for the Los Angeles Times, Carolina Miranda not only ventured several possible antecedents—most notably the Ovoid Theater in the IBM Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, designed by Charles and Ray Eames and Eero Saarinen, and composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s spherical Kugelauditorium built for Expo 70 in Osaka—but also placed Sphere in a specific Las Vegas lineage of immersive entertainment environments going back at least fifty years to themed casinos like Caesars Palace and Circus Circus. Given that immersion has become a charged concept in discussions of Sphere, it is grounding to understand it in such local context. In this way the building is not a novelty but rather just the latest development in the strong tradition of eye-catching Vegas phantasm. Or as Jackson Arn wrote in his review for the New Yorker, “Las Vegas—a place whose economy depends on people who realize that gambling is for suckers but who strut into the casino all the same—knows better.”
Personally, I confess that I had no mind for any criticism as I felt myself flying through the spires of the Dolomites in the first minutes of Aronofsky’s film. He and the producers have created a genuinely effective environment in the theater, where the clear sound and vibrating seats work to support the massive technovisual display. Full of striking footage of the natural world, the film would seem to be the optimal format for Sphere. Immersive or not, the experience is awesome.
It turns out that Aronofsky’s Postcard is a video message, sent along with a pair of would-be human colonizers of a far-off planet in the future that plays as they wake from a deep interstellar slumber and remember their earthly roots. With footage from all over the globe flashing across the giant, crisp screen, the audience hovers above the savannah, swims in a school of fish, and faces off with an enormous spider—think BBC’s Planet Earth on steroids. As the parable unfolds, the scenes turn from wondrous to ominous, documenting anthropogenic ecological collapse that has forced the human race to evacuate to spaceship sanctuaries. (Which humans, specifically, one is left to wonder.) In the end, the galactic Adam and Eve descend from their space pod to find a habitable planet on which, in time-lapse speed, they successfully propagate a new Earth.
For a promotional vehicle that needed only to demonstrate the extraordinary capabilities of Sphere, Postcard veers off the mark with its tone-deaf admonishment. In fact, it only deserves further mention because of the gross dissonance of charging admission to see such moralizing in a structure that cost $2.3 billion to build, lost almost $100 million in its first quarter of operation, and keeps 1.2 million LEDs illuminated eighteen hours a day in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
That would be the 580,000-square-foot LED screen on the building’s exterior, perhaps the world’s most famous billboard since it was switched on in July. Displaying marquee ads interspersed with mesmerizing spherical graphics—face emojis, eyeballs, moons, and planets have been recurrent themes—the so-called Exosphere continues to attract attention well beyond the Strip as a consummately sharable image.
With its form an unblemished ideal object, its facade a digital billboard set on auto-refresh, Sphere is more attuned to the flow of the feed than to the rhythm of the city.
The sight of people crowding the bridge over Sands Avenue between the Venetian and Wynn casinos suggests that the ideal distance for taking in the revolving content show is about a half mile away. Seen from any closer, not only do the tighter angles obscure perspectives but the orb itself begins to atomize into so many LED pucks, which are mounted about ten inches apart on galvanized channels hung from the diagrid structure. In a sublime anticlimax, the Exosphere appears to dissolve up close, frustrating monumentality in spite of its colossal form and reinforcing the idea of the building as an image perceived from some optimal viewpoint, or better yet a photograph.
To arrive at Sphere, then, is to be a bit perplexed and underwhelmed at the tangible reality of an absurdly large emoji. Because Sphere lies off the Strip, on the far side of a parking garage that sits behind two separate conference centers sprawling out the back of casino hotels, very few will walk along the sidewalk to get there. Arriving by car or taxi, visitors are directed from a parking garage to an empty concrete plaza hemmed in tightly by a fire lane, where they queue to pass through security under a ten-foot-high portico that frames a low slit in the bottom of the building. The perfectly symmetrical form of a sphere may have no front, but here everything feels like the back door. Embedded in the concrete apron at about its twentieth parallel, the 516-foot-diameter truncated globe casts a ponderously introverted figure on the plaza—not a trace of Boullée where it is needed the most. There is a sanctioned pedestrian route, however, via an enclosed bridge from the rear of the Venetian Expo Center that skirts the south side of Sands and connects into Sphere at the second-floor atrium level. This route is utter junkspace, especially at the end of the show when a horde empties out in the bowels of the convention center and tramps down the carpeted halls back to the casino floor.
To critique the urban fabric around Las Vegas Boulevard would be a foolhardy crusade, but the coarse treatment of urban scene and sequence at Sphere is significant because it underscores a crucial aspect of the building’s presence: It is siteless. With its form an unblemished ideal object, its facade a digital billboard set on auto-refresh, Sphere is more attuned to the flow of the feed than to the rhythm of the city. This differs from the cosmopolitan nonchalance affected by certain prestige architectural projects that touch down in global capitals. There is a sense that without its umbilical connection to the Venetian Expo, at any time this Sphere might just roll away.
In fact, Sphere does exist elsewhere. On a lot adjacent to Hollywood Burbank Airport, MSG Sphere Studios occupies an unadorned gray geodesic dome, or hemisphere. Situated within the talent pool of Los Angeles—Disney Studios is ten minutes down the road—and across the street from the one-hour flight to Las Vegas, this remote studio where research, design, and production development occur suggests broader ambitions for Sphere. To wit, plans for replica Spheres are in the works. These were hardly dampened after London mayor Sadiq Khan squashed a proposal for a Stratford Sphere in November, with a Sphere spokesperson saying “There are many forward-thinking cities” for the company to focus on instead. So don’t fret if it takes some time before a Sphere lands in your town. Odds are you have already seen it.