COSMOPOLITAN OF LAS VEGAS | Hotel Digital Experience | 2011
A hotel lobby that became an art gallery / Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas "Hotel Digital Experience"
In a Las Vegas hotel lobby stand eight LED columns running floor to ceiling. What plays on them isn't ads, it's art. This is the project that won the Grand Prix in the Design category at the 2011 Cannes Lions.
The problem
Las Vegas can't quite shake its image as a "tacky town." The Cosmopolitan Hotel opened there at a cost of 3.9 billion dollars, and it brought in Digital Kitchen from Chicago to chase after guests who weren't just coming to gamble.
The insight
What the team set out to do was turn the hotel itself into a canvas. Instead of treating the columns as mere screens, they tried to design them as three-dimensional objects with real volume, almost as if someone were living inside them. The trick of making a wall of bookshelves look completely real came out of that same thinking.
The idea
They kept artist and filmmaker works running across all eight columns, turning the lobby into a "virtual gallery" whose look was always changing. There was "Navigation," where the books on the shelves light up one after another, and "Current," where lightbulbs sway and flicker. The theme throughout was discovery and temptation. The system behind the scenes that delivers all this content was reportedly built entirely from scratch, and that alone apparently took months.
What happened
The project won multiple awards at Cannes, including the Grand Prix. The lobby became a tourist spot people photograph, right alongside the Bellagio fountains. The hotel's CEO put it plainly: "This isn't marketing. It's just art."
Afterthought
They turned a hotel from a place you just sleep in into a place where simply standing there makes you part of the art. That's an incredibly luxurious idea, and an incredibly open one too. Maybe this was one of the earliest examples of a job that's really about building a space itself.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Grand Prix 2011
