Palazzo Casino Resort

November/December 2007

Palazzo Resort Packs a Powerful Punch

New $1.8-billion Palazzo Las Vegas Strip casino and hotel requires extreme structural engineering and sitework finesse

By Tony Illia

The 50-story, 3,042-room Palazzo Casino Resort makes its Strip debut in December, across from the Wynn Las Vegas.

Las vegas strip megaresorts are eye candy that dazzle and delight millions of visitors each year, thanks, in large part, to their complex building system. The city’s resort operators constantly one-up each other with bigger, bolder and more elaborate casino creations.

Las Vegas Sands Corp., the local firm responsible for The Venetian, is currently building the Strip’s newest jaw-dropping attraction the $1.8-billion, 3,042-room Palazzo Casino Resort. When it debuts in December, it will be Vegas’ largest hotel-casino complex, at least for a while. MGM Mirage’s $7.4-billion, 18.67-million-sq-ft CityCenter will surpass it when it opens in November 2009.

The Palazzo is located at the southeast corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sands Avenue, across from the Wynn Las Vegas. It connects to The Venetian to its south, giving Las Vegas Sands more than 7,000 guest rooms on the Strip.

A Tight Site

The 7.5-million-sq-ft Palazzo will be more than three times larger than the Empire State Building, yet the massive undertaking is being packed into a narrow 8-acre site with near-zero lot lines. Site constraints, a lack of staging area and an aggressive 41-month schedule created some unique challenges for the project’s simple-fee construction manager, AGC Las Vegas Chapter memberTaylor International Corp. of Las Vegas.

“We had nearly no room for staging onsite, creating a coordination nightmare,” says James N. Mason, Taylor’s project executive. “It has meant careful planning with all the material suppliers.”

The Palazzo podium features four dramatic glass domes, the largest of which measures 110 ft in diameter and is 100 ft tall.

In order to maximize its Strip-front real estate, Las Vegas Sands decided to go underground. Contractors removed 1.2 million cu yd of earth from the property to create a four-level, 4,000-space, subterranean cast-in-place parking structure. There is another below-grade level for back-of-house services. Granite Construction Co., Watsonville, Calif., is the earthwork contractor.

“It took 114,285 truck trips over 16 months to remove all the dirt,” says Don Sawyer, Granite’s project manager. “There were up to 600 truck trips a day, running double shifts, six days a week.”

Crews excavated down 60 ft, using a 390-ft-long, 18° earthen service ramp at Sands Avenue for truck traffic. Granite utilized 10 pumps with a combined 40,000-gallon-per-day capacity to dewater the site. The building footprint, which consumes nearly the entire site, rests atop a foundation of 747 drilled and reinforced piers from 4 ft to 8 ft in diameter and 60 ft to 120 ft deep. The foundation mat required an 8,000-cu-yd, 11-hour continuous concrete pour with six pumps placing 750 cu yd per hour.

“It took months of planning to coordinate truck traffic off the Strip, with no staging area available at the street level,” says Mike Sherwood, vice president of Nevada Ready Mix Inc., the Las Vegas-based material supplier. “[Taylor] did an incredible job of pushing all of the equipment inside the hole out of the way.”

The 2-million-sq-ft garage, is built with an 80-ft-deep secant pile retaining system with four layers of tiebacks. Issac Construction Co. Inc., Las Vegas, is the concrete contractor. The 645-ft-tall hotel tower rises from grade level into a Y-shaped, steel-framed structure clad with EIFS, stone and glass.

Structural Marvel

The 50-story Palazzo was designed by Dallas-based HKS Inc. with Walter P. Moore, Houston, as structural engineer. It was built using steel-frame structural members, bolted and welded together, with up to 18-in.-wide, 48-in.-deep I-beam girders.

The hotel has concrete shear-wall elevator and stairwell corridors, concrete-over-metal-decking flooring and concrete-filled, 1.5-in.-thick plate-steel built-up box girders for lateral, X-frame bracing at each end of the building. The tower’s southern wing cantilevers 18 ft over the neighboring Venetian an engineering feat that required an 18-in.-thick, 15-ft-wide megacolumn that extends from the foundation footings up through the seventh floor.

“It’s a lot of square footage packed into what is essentially a postage-sized lot,” says David Platten, a principal with Walter P. Moore. “Steel provided speed of erection with no formwork or cure time. Steel was also lighter than concrete, which was a consideration due to the soil conditions.”

The Palazzo will use 70,000 tons of structural steel. Steel enabled a more flexible erection sequence, allowing work to occur from one end to the other as opposed to pouring a full floor at a time. The strategy, however, depended on steel fabrication staying ahead of the erection schedule. The lengthy site excavation gave Schuff International, the Phoenix-based steel fabricator/erector, enough time to produce the building’s structural components.

Site constraints forced the firm to stage materials at a 23-acre rented property eight miles away. Schuff prepared the next day’s steel members in advance and trucked them to the jobsite, using a parking garage level as temporary storage.

Not a Theme Palace

The tower rose at a rate of a floor a week due in part to three 30,000-lb-capacity hammerhead tower cranes running through the middle of the building, along with five mobile crawler and rough-terrain cranes. The hotel features 31-ft, 6-in. framing bays that are the equivalent of two guest rooms. The modules enable the owners to conceal 24-in.-deep supporting beams between rooms, thereby creating more usable space. Rooms range from 655 sq ft to 735 sq ft, each with a 12-in. step that creates a sunken living room. The bilevel configuration is part of the Palazzo’s signature ambience.

Palazzo required the services of 4,000 tradesmen and 150 subcontractors during the height of construction activity.

“The owners didn’t really want a themed property like The Venetian,” says Rodney Morrison, HKS’ project manager-in-charge of construction administration. “The idea was to create an upscale building using Rodeo Drive, Bel-Air and Beverly Hills as inspiration.”

Palazzo’s opulent appearance relies on several different finishes, from gold-leaf and honeycomb panels to sandblasted glass and hand-painted ceilings. Finishes reflect different functions, from high-end baccarat areas to back-of-house services. The project boasts 1.8 million sq ft. of stone, marble and granite, requiring more than 400 masons for installation.

Las Vegas-based Silver State Marble LLC supplied and placed 11,000 tons worth of Irish green stone, Egyptian marble and other fine finishes. The property uses recessed and indirect lighting, along with 45 chandeliers, including a 15-ft-dia, 3,000-lb formed-glass overlapping-leaf creation over the “Gold Bar.”

The hotel tower is skirted by an elaborate four-level, 1-million-sq-ft podium that houses a 105,000-sq-ft casino, 2,000-seat theater and seven new restaurants with offerings from celebrity chefs Wolfgang Puck and Mario Batali. The structure also contains a 450,000-sq-ft convention area and a 72,000-sq-ft, 2,500-person grand ballroom. It has a two-level, 450,000-sq-ft shopping mall with 80 high-end retail stores and boutiques, including Barneys New York and Salvatore Ferragamo. Each space has its own individual contractor, adding another layer of coordination.

Construction of the 645-ft-tall Palazzo Casino Resort on the Las Vegas Strip required 70,000 tons of structural steel.

Palazzo has seen up to 4,000 workers and 150 subcontractors during the height of construction activity. The project’s luxurious look required 20,000 pages of building documents. “Since January, the Palazzo has cost $2 million a day to build,” Mason says. “That’s for workmen, materials, fabrication everything.”

It’s easy to understand why. The podium, for example, has an 11,000-sq-ft, Strip-front aluminum-glass-curtain wall, plus six skylights and four dramatic glass domes, the largest measuring 110 ft in diameter and 100 ft tall. The podium uses 150 structural transfer columns, with three street-level setbacks from 50 ft to 100 ft tall.

It also boasts 45 pools and water features, including a semi-circular, 50,000-gallon cascading porte-cohere fountain that originates from a 50-ft-high marble chalice. Another 22-ft-tall, green-marble fountain is built under the 9,000-sq-ft retail octagon dome [that] serves as a visitor gathering area.

The podium rooftop doubles as a landscaped outdoor recreation deck consisting of eight swimming pools, 12 spas, 30 cabanas, two public and three service bars. The dynamic load requires supporting steel bathtubs around the pools with up to 8-ft-deep girders along the perimeters. The pool rooftop connects to The Venetian amenities deck to the south as well as to a 161-ft-long, 16-ft-wide pedestrian bridge over Sands Avenue to the north.

The project additionally attaches to The Venetian at the ground level and shares its central plant, which was expanded to handle the added occupancy load.

Hansen Mechanical Contractors Inc., Las Vegas, a unit of EMCOR Group Inc., Norwalk, Conn., installed two 700-hp gas-fired boilers, 45 air handlers, each with a 35,000-cfm rating, and four chillers for an additional 12,500 tons of cooling capacity.