How Las Vegas’ Sphere Actually Works: A Looks Inside the New $2.3 Billion Arena

If the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca is the Roman empire of our time, sure­ly it must have an equiv­a­lent of the Colos­se­um. A year ago, you could’ve heard a wide vari­ety of spec­u­la­tions as to what struc­ture that could pos­si­bly be. Today, many of us would sim­ply respond with “the Sphere,” espe­cial­ly if we hap­pen to be think-piece writ­ers. Since it opened last Sep­tem­ber, Sphere — to use its prop­er, arti­cle-free brand name — has inspired more than a few reflec­tions on what it says about the inter­sec­tion of tech­nol­o­gy and cul­ture here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, not to men­tion the con­sid­er­able ambi­tion and expense of its design and con­struc­tion.

A $2.3 bil­lion dome whose inte­ri­or and exte­ri­or are both enor­mous screens — vis­i­ble, one often hears, even from out­er space — Sphere would hard­ly make sense any­where in Amer­i­ca but Las Vegas, where it makes a good deal of sense indeed. Its loca­tion has also made pos­si­ble such irre­sistible head­lines as “Sphere and Loathing in Las Vegas,” below which the Atlantic’s Char­lie Warzel gets into the details of this “archi­tec­tur­al embod­i­ment of ridicu­lous­ness,” includ­ing its sur­pris­ing ori­gin: “Accord­ing to James Dolan, the enter­tain­ment mogul who financed the Sphere, the inspi­ra­tion for the build­ing came from ‘The Veldt,’ a 1950 short sto­ry by Ray Brad­bury” involv­ing a fam­i­ly house with giant screens for walls that can ren­der what­ev­er the chil­dren imag­ine.

Nat­u­ral­ly, the kids get hooked, and when Mom and Dad try to inter­vene, the screens send forth a pack of lions to eat them. “Though the Sphere’s mar­ket­ing pitch doesn’t explic­it­ly men­tion being mauled by big dig­i­tal cats,” Warzel writes, “I got the notion that at least part of the allure of com­ing to the Sphere is a desire to be over­whelmed.” How, exact­ly, the venue mar­shals its advanced tech­nol­o­gy to do that over­whelm­ing is explained in the MegaBuilds video at the top of the post. With its form not quite like any event space built in human his­to­ry, it neces­si­tat­ed the inven­tion of every­thing from a cus­tom cam­era sys­tem to audio-per­me­able screen sur­faces, none of which came cheap.

Hence the cost of see­ing a show at Sphere, whether it be the Dar­ren Aronof­sky’s “docu-film” Post­card from Earth, U2’s Achtung Baby-based res­i­den­cy ear­li­er this year, or the now-show­ing Dead & Com­pa­ny, which revives not just the Grate­ful Dead in their var­i­ous incar­na­tions over the decades, but also the sto­ried venues in which they played. Its view­ers could hard­ly fail to be aston­ished by the sheer spec­ta­cle, even if they know noth­ing of the Dead­’s col­or­ful his­to­ry. All of them will no doubt be moved to con­sid­er his­to­ry itself: that of human­i­ty, tech­nol­o­gy, and civ­i­liza­tion, all of which has led up to this rare thing Warzel calls “a brand-new, non-phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal sen­so­ry expe­ri­ence.” Say what you will about the over­stim­u­la­tion and excess rep­re­sent­ed by Sphere; if you can blow a Dead­head­’s mind, you’re def­i­nite­ly on to some­thing.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Absurd Logis­tics of Con­cert Tours: The Behind-the-Scenes Prepa­ra­tion You Don’t Get to See

U2’s Bono & the Edge Give Sur­prise Con­cert in Kyiv Metro/Bomb Shel­ter: “Stand by Me,” “Angel of Harlem,” and “With or With­out You”

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Japan’s Inflat­able Con­cert Hall

Stream a Mas­sive Archive of Grate­ful Dead Con­certs from 1965–1995

Read Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, as It Was Orig­i­nal­ly Pub­lished in Rolling Stone (1971)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.