ca-si-no (kc-se-no), n. [pl. CASINOS (-noz), CASINI (-ne)], [It., dim. of casa; L. casa, a house, cottage], 1. In Italy, a small country house; summerhouse. 2. A public room or building for musical or theatrical performances, dancing, gambling, etc. 3. cassino
From Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language
College Edition
World Publishing Country
Cleveland and New York
1968
The idoru said this apartment was called a casino. Chia had seen casinos on television and they hadn’t looked anything like this. This was a few small rooms with flaking plaster walls and big old-fashioned furniture with gold lion-feet. Everything worked up with fractals so you could almost smell it. It would’ve smelled dusty, she thought, and also like perfume. Chia hadn’t been to many of those modules, the insides of her Venice, because they were all sort of creepy. They didn’t give her the feeling she got in the streets……
The idoru was talking, though, telling Chia that old Venetian meaning of the word casino, not some giant sort of mall place where people went to gamble and watch shows, but something that sounded more like what Masahiko had said about love hotels. Like people had houses where they lived, but these casinos, these secret little apartments hidden around town, were where they went to be with other people. But they hadn’t been too comfortable there, not to judge by this one, even though the idoru kept adding more and more candles. The idoru said she loved candles…..
From Idoru
by William Gibson
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York
1996
We were the architects for The Venetian.
All of us were constantly looking for the moral justification that would excuse our being involved in the design of a Las Vegas casino. A casino was (despite Webster’s view) no more than a lecherous den of inequity in the desert created specifically for the purpose of extracting the hard earned dollars of those unfortunate masses who were either hopelessly addicted to gambling, didn’t know any better, or had nothing else to do. It always came down to this - how could architects be part of a process that exploited a known human affliction for the sole purpose of making money?
As architects we consider ourselves professionals, and by a strict definition of the word that is correct. We are highly trained to render a service that is primarily a mental activity rather than a manual one. There has always been an unspoken fear among us, however, that we are second tier professionals - lagging distantly behind lawyers and doctors in income and slightly below priests and artists in virtue. Maybe our close alliance to the hands-on activities of the building trades reinforces the suspicion that ours is a less worthy pursuit than the purer professions.
Mantles of healing and justice drape the doctors and lawyers. Artists pursue truth and expression, and priests probe the mystery of religious belief. The architectural ideal is shelter, and our profession has always been concerned with the eternal need for people to harbor themselves in places protected from the harsh world. Architects invent those places and we cause them to be built. We give physical form to the great institutions of mankind, including hospitals, courts of law and cathedrals.
This has always been enough of a philosophical base to solidly found a reasonable self image, even if speculative real estate development threatens to undermine it. Developers ask architects to design buildings which are constructed primarily as vehicles for the extraction of financial gain. It is easy to bypass this because we have never had any compunction about designing expressions of corporate or national power. We can simply concentrate on glorifying the activities that occur within the buildings. Frank Lloyd Wright made the Larkin Building a crystallization of American corporate activity. His Johnson Wax Building was a pure expression of the relationship of the American worker to the open space of the great prairies, and a celebration of structure that could support that noble ideal. Good architects can provide the intellectual basis for their design, regardless of the source of financing or the reason for its being.
Casinos present a problem of rationale. They need to be built quickly and as inexpensively as possible, so there is little emphasis on anything but the most standard and trustworthy building systems. The time necessary for a well considered intellectual design construct is usually squandered on a detailed analysis of whether the available space ought to house more slot machines or blackjack tables. The casino requires an appearance sufficiently attractive only to convince the gambling patron to walk in the door, and every day that the casino is not built is a day that revenue is not being generated. The architect is reduced to the role of technical assistant in the process of constructing a money machine. The moral imperative is removed.
Chris Belknap served as our ethical bellwether. He resisted working on the design of the casino proper not only because its purpose offended his sense of propriety, but also because he knew it would line the pockets of its owners with money. Money, as he saw it, that was taken from people helpless to prevent its removal from their pockets. Ultimately, it was money that enriched Sheldon Adelson - a man who neither needed nor deserved it. Didn’t need it because he was a billionaire, and didn’t deserve it because he was taking it from people who were willingly giving it to him despite the fact that they knew better. All the people had to do was not come into the casino, but there would always be someone who would come in, and Sheldon would be waiting there, arm extended, to relieve them of their cash. Chris was the only one of us who never gambled even a quarter, because he believed that it was not the right thing to do.
Sheldon was smart enough to meet Chris halfway, although he never mired himself in the trap of intellectual rationale, and he never felt the need to justify his activities. Making money was enough for him, but he knew he had to motivate the people working for him. So his argument to Chris (and by proxy to the rest of us) went something like this:
"No amount of money that I make in this venture is going to change my lifestyle one iota. Whether I have one billion or two billion or ten billion will make no difference to the way I live. But the more money I have the more money that I can give away. And in the end won’t that help the world?" We were all familiar with Sheldon’s reputation as a philanthropist.
It was an argument that none of us would ever refute.
By James E. Beyer
1998