The Angel in the Details: Las Vegas through the looking glass

Las Vegas is known as a city of grand design gestures — in the space of a few city blocks we have, after all, a giant clown, a dancing lake, and a beam of light that can be seen from space. But if we look closer, a thrilling and more abstract city materializes, one of grace notes, strange slivers cut away from the grand kitsch, accidental beauties encountered in passing. In changing the scale of our gaze, we make our familiar spaces suddenly unfamiliar and oddly new. A menagerie of fragments invites us to think differently by seeing differently, and the bright universe we’ve built in this valley reveals itself in the language of angles and curves and reflections. This is tourism for the mind, Las Vegas as it was meant to be — a real trip.