LAS VEGAS ALERT! A $275 Million Hotel COLLAPSES Before It Opens | KaLintos

“LAS VEGAS ALERT! A $275 Million Hotel COLLAPSES Before It Opens | KaLintos In 2007, MGM Mirage broke ground on CityCenter — the largest privately financed construction project in American history. At its center stood the Harmon Hotel: a 49-story oval glass tower designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Norman Foster, meant to signal that Las Vegas had finally gotten serious about architecture. It never opened. It never will. Hidden inside 15 floors of hardened concrete, rebar had been installed in the wrong position, the wrong size, or not at all. The defects weren’t caught by the general contractor. They weren’t caught by the structural engineer. They weren’t caught by the third-party inspector — the one who filed 62 daily reports certifying work he hadn’t seen. They were caught by county civil servants with a clipboard. What followed was a trap with no exits. The building couldn’t be repaired. It couldn’t be imploded. And it couldn’t stay standing — not with a 50% probability of a triggering earthquake within 30 years and an engineering report concluding it would partially or completely collapse if one arrived. So it was taken apart by hand. Floor by floor. Fourteen months. At a cost of $11.5 million — to demolish a building that cost $275 million to build and never served a single guest. This is the full story of the Harmon Hotel: the architect, the defects, the falsified reports, the financial crisis that arrived at exactly the wrong moment, and the legal settlement reached on the courthouse steps the morning the trial was set to begin. No criminal charges were ever filed #HarmonHotel #LasVegas #Architecture #ConstructionFail #NormanFoster #Documentary #CityCenter #Engineering #UrbanHistory #abandonedbuildings Harmon Hotel, Harmon Hotel Las Vegas, CityCenter Las Vegas, MGM CityCenter, MGM Resorts, Norman Foster, Norman Foster architecture, construction failure, construction disaster, architectural failure, building defects, structural engineering failure, rebar defects, link beam, Las Vegas history, Las Vegas construction, abandoned buildings, never opened hotel, demolished building, building demolished, tallest demolished building, Perini Building Company, Clark County Nevada, Las Vegas earthquake, seismic risk Las Vegas, construction negligence, falsified inspection reports, construction fraud, $8.5 billion, privately financed construction, largest construction project, Foster architecture, Pritzker Prize, luxury hotel failure, real estate disaster, Las Vegas Strip, Las Vegas Strip history, urban history, architecture documentary, construction documentary, engineering documentary, building failure documentary, how buildings fail, structural failure, high rise failure, deconstruction, building deconstruction, Las Vegas 2008, financial crisis construction, MGM Mirage, Jim Murren, 63 at CityCenter, Las Vegas mall, construction inspection, third party inspection, Converse Consultants, Pacific Coast Steel, Halcrow Yolles, Widinger Associates, building implosion, why building wasn’t imploded, hand demolition, floor by floor demolition, construction lawsuit, Perini lawsuit, MGM lawsuit, construction settlement, no criminal charges construction”