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

“A 26-story luxury hotel on the Las Vegas Strip stood empty for six years, wrapped in the largest vinyl advertisement in America — a $275 million skyscraper turned into a billboard for the buildings around it. Then they took it apart by hand, floor by floor, before a single guest ever checked in. This is the story of The Harmon Hotel at MGM CityCenter — the tallest building in U.S. history voluntarily demolished for construction defects. Designed by Norman Foster, the Pritzker laureate behind the Gherkin and Apple Park, the Harmon was supposed to be the boutique-luxury jewel of the largest privately financed construction project this country had ever attempted: an $8.5 billion joint venture between MGM Mirage and Dubai World. It never opened. In July 2008, Clark County inspectors discovered that rebar inside the shear-wall link beams had been misplaced across 15 of 22 completed floors. Between March and July 2008, third-party inspectors had filed 62 false daily inspection reports certifying work that was never done. The skyscraper died of paperwork. Then came the 2008 financial crisis, MGM’s near-bankruptcy, Jim Murren’s $3.8 billion rescue, the cancellation of the 207-condo program, the Weidlinger report predicting partial or complete collapse in a magnitude 7.7 quake, the world’s most expensive billboard, the $500 million courthouse-steps settlement, the floor-by-floor manual deconstruction, and the $11.5 million it cost just to make a Foster tower disappear. What’s there now? A four-story mall on a footprint built for 49 stories. #LasVegas #Skyscraper #Engineering #ConstructionDefects #CollapseRadar #UrbanExploration #Architecture #NormanFoster #MGM #CityCenter #Demolition #StructuralEngineering #LasVegasStrip #Harmon”