Las Vegas CityCenter a ‘No Sweat’ Building Project
Photo courtesy of Viega LLC.
Over the past three years, the mammoth MGM Mirage CityCenter project—a 66-acre, $14 billion new construction gamble in the heart of Las Vegas—has played out like a real-life cliffhanger novel.
Its main characters include a Hollywood movie empire, cash-rich Arab sheiks, high-rolling international financiers and some of the world’s biggest casino operators. The project has teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, but with completion now less than a year away, it’s about to pay off.
A city within a city, the project occupies some of the most valuable real estate on or off the fabled Las Vegas Strip. Nearly 50 buildings, a few up to 70 stories tall, will provide 18 million square feet of space devoted to hotels, casinos, luxury condominiums, restaurants, theaters and retail shops, and even a private fire department and security police force.
Miles of high-quality, high-value copper pipe and fittings have been installed to serve the water and air conditioning needs of this mega-project. But it is almost impossible to find a single soldered copper joint. The CityCenter project easily qualifies as the largest construction effort ever to use solderless, flameless pipe-joining methods—a testament to the trust the developers have placed in press-on fittings.
