Why Las Vegas is building a $4BN guitar-shaped skyscraper

Video hosted by Fred Mills. This video contains paid promotion for Rayon Design.

THERE'S only one place on earth you’ll find a pyramid, an Eiffel Tower and an enormous, glowing ball. Vegas.

And to stand out in Sin City, you have to be really bold. Hard Rock has taken that challenge and run with it, creating the latest entrant to The B1M’s Whacky Building Awards: a 201 metre hotel-casino in the shape of a massive guitar.

But this latest structure is about more than catching the eye. The city is evolving and it begs the question - is the Vegas we all used to know dead?

Above: Hard Rock Las Vegas is building a 201 metre tall guitar on the Strip. Images: Fred Mills.

Goodbye to The Mirage

The Mirage was one of the most iconic buildings to ever grace the Vegas Strip. Built in the late 1980s for $630 million, this was the world’s most expensive hotel-casino at the time. Adjusted for inflation, that’s an eye-watering $1.7 billion.

Beyond its immense cost, The Mirage was the first resort built on the Strip in 15 years and marked the birth of the city’s mega-hotels. The recipe for a resort in Vegas became clear: luxurious, massive, and with its own unique aesthetic. After all, The Mirage was a three winged, Polynesian themed resort in the shape of a ‘Y’, complete with a 17-metre tall exploding volcano.

Above: The Mirage was a three winged hotel-casino, featuring a 17-metre tall volcano.

One step from the middle of Las Vegas and suddenly you could be in a tropical paradise, or Paris, New York, Egypt – or even Ancient Rome. But Sin City is anything but sentimental. The Mirage’s volcano saw its final eruption on 16th July 2024 – and now, it’s time for a new icon.

The world's biggest guitar

Much like the nearby Sphere, Hard Rock Las Vegas’ shape is less about function and all about spectacle. The days of brick facades and street-side billboards in the city are ending.

Coated in a dual-tone blue glass LED facade, Hard Rock Las Vegas is its own billboard. At night, a striking light display will climb from the building’s guitar strings, piercing the sky, visible for miles around. Even before nightfall, this will be the Strip’s third tallest building making it pretty hard to miss.

But while the design is a lot of fun, it’s an absolute engineering nightmare. When we talk about skyscrapers, you probably imagine something symmetrical, blocky: simple. Like a lot of the towers in New York, they're not exactly straightforward but, they're tried and tested.

By contrast, Hard Rock Las Vegas is uneven, curving in and out all the way up the sides of the structure. The guitar itself sits on top of a podium of concrete pillars constructed using flyer columns. That podium is where the hotel begins.

Above: Hard Rock Las Vegas poses a unique engineering challenge because of its irregular shape. Images: Fred Mills.

The building’s geometry calls for absolute engineering precision. Each floor is unique, varying in size, shape and length, meaning a wide variety of weight distributions and load paths. The actual tower is centred around two concrete cores, one for the elevators and one for the stairs.

Stretching out from there are floor plates that take on a variety of different shapes and sizes. In a more conventional skyscraper, the floor plates are normally pretty repetitive, meaning you can use the same formwork sequence as you work up each floor, but here that’s not the case. Because of the building’s shape, every floor is unique.

They’re supported by reinforced concrete columns and post tension slabs which are concrete floors that have been strengthened with internal steel cables. As the concrete hardens and gains strength, those cables, or tendons, are tensioned and that helps the concrete to support more weight.

When construction completes in 2027, this giant will stand 42 storeys tall but it isn’t where Hard Rock Las Vegas ends. The whole development will host around 3,700 rooms, one of the biggest casinos in the city and an array of entertainment spaces.

As huge as this guitar is, all of those amenities won't fit inside the tower which is why The Mirage lives on - in a way. The three winged building remains but it’s been gutted to house the rest of the Hard Rock Las Vegas amenities.

The changing face of Vegas

Around the world Vegas is recognised as this ostentatious paradise of budget hotels and quirky entertainment. Anything goes in Sin City, and while the chances are that $5 spent on a slot machine probably won’t get you the fortune you’re hoping for, maybe – just this once - you might win and that’s part of the fascination. Or at least, it was.

The reality is that the face of the city is changing. As reported by the New York Post in 2024, 64% of Vegas visitors earned $100,000 or more per annum. A year later, that had risen to 44% earning at least $150,000 p/a.

Vegas has always been synonymous with gambling, but figures point towards that no longer being enough. According to the Nevada Gaming Control Board, in 2025 gaming accounted for about 26% of total casino revenue on the Strip. That’s less than half of what it was in 1990.

Above: Vegas is going through a transformation, moving towards a new offering.

It’s becoming more and more expensive to gamble in Vegas and if you read the reports, it’s becoming harder to win. Modern resorts are casinos, hotels, spas and concert halls all rolled into one - multiple wealth generating arms designed to maximise returns.

As reported by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the older hotels were often constructed without plans for future expansion and so struggled to compete with the scale of new developments. It’s more beneficial to just get rid and start again. Land here is valuable but bricks and mortar? Not so much.

When The Mirage opened in 1989, it was the next big thing but now, it’s in the shadow of the world’s biggest guitar. It’s bittersweet, but it’s the reality of Vegas. The fact that these resorts are constantly reinventing themselves, burning bright and imploding on the Strip, is part of the attraction.

And who knows what the next mega-resort will look like or how long The Mirage’s successor will stick around? Only in Vegas can people be thinking about the implosion date of a building before it officially opens.

But for now, at least, we can safely say Hard Rock Las Vegas seems to have struck a chord.

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Additional footage and images: Raiders 1967, Monster4711, Jeff Hitchcock, Farragutful, FOX5, Danny | Las Vegas Stories, Dave O Shepardson, lifewiththecookies, KTNV, billisa, taroliw, Hard Rock International, Deb, Jason James, Bob n Renee, cliff1066, dlofink and Warner Bros.

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