ARIA Resort & Casino

ARIA Resort & Casino rises in two curved towers of glass at the centre of CityCenter, the 67-acre urban development built between Bellagio and Park MGM on the Las Vegas Strip. It opened on 16 December 2009 as the flagship of a project that cost about 8.5 billion dollars, the largest privately financed construction in the United States at the time. Designed by César Pelli, certified LEED Gold and hung with museum-grade art, it is the contemporary luxury hotel in Las Vegas for groups that want a modern building rather than a theme.

History

CityCenter was announced by MGM Mirage in 2004 as a joint venture with Dubai World, with ARIA as its hotel and casino, the Vdara and Mandarin Oriental (now Waldorf Astoria) hotels, the Veer residential towers and the Crystals shopping centre. Construction took four years through the financial crisis and opened in December 2009. The first resident show, Viva Elvis by Cirque du Soleil, ran from 2010 to 2012 and was replaced by Zarkana from 2012 to 2016. The convention centre was expanded in 2018. In 2021 MGM Resorts bought out its partner and sold the real estate of ARIA and Vdara to Blackstone, continuing as operator under a lease.

Architecture and design

Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects designed the hotel as two curved towers of 61 storeys joined by a podium, their facades of glass angled to shade the rooms from the desert sun. The resort earned LEED Gold certification for its energy and water systems, among them a central plant shared across CityCenter and the first large-scale use in Las Vegas of natural light in a casino floor. The public areas hold the CityCenter Fine Art Collection: Maya Lin's Silver River, a cast of the Colorado River in reclaimed silver behind the reception desk; Jenny Holzer's Vegas, a scrolling text in the north valet; Henry Moore's Reclining Connected Forms; and works by Nancy Rubins, Richard Long, and Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, whose Typewriter Eraser, Scale X stands at the entrance.

Rooms and suites

ARIA has 4,004 rooms and suites. Each room has floor-to-ceiling windows and a control system that sets curtains, lighting, temperature and music from a tablet, an innovation at opening. The Sky Suites occupy the upper floors with their own entrance, lobby, pool and lounge, and the largest suites have two bedrooms and views over the Strip or the mountains.

Dining

The restaurants include Jean Georges Steakhouse, Carbone, the Las Vegas branch of the New York Italian-American restaurant, Catch, Bardot Brasserie and Julian Serrano Tapas, with cafés and bars on the casino level and a poolside restaurant in season.

Wellness

The Spa & Salon at ARIA covers two floors with treatment rooms, a salt room, heated stone beds and a fitness centre. Three pools and the Liquid pool lounge occupy the deck between the towers, with cabanas and gardens.

Weddings and events

ARIA's convention centre, expanded in 2018, has about 500,000 square feet of meeting space with the Pinyon, Ironwood, Bristlecone and Juniper ballrooms and a rooftop terrace, the Cypress Executive Lounge and the Ironwood terrace for receptions. It is one of the largest meeting floors on the Strip and hosts technology, medical and financial conferences through the year. Weddings are held in the ballrooms, on the terraces and in the Sky Suites, with receptions in the restaurants' private rooms.

Location

The hotel is at 3730 South Las Vegas Boulevard, set back from the Strip behind the Crystals shopping centre, between Bellagio and Park MGM. A free tram links ARIA to Bellagio and Park MGM, and the Cosmopolitan adjoins to the north. A taxi to Harry Reid International Airport, about 5 kilometres away, takes roughly 12 minutes.