Rem Koolhaas’s Guggenheim isn’t what Robert Venturi had in mind when he learnt from Las Vegas, says Mark Irving

Another lesson from Las Vegas And so they stood, not exactly with pistols poised, but near enough. To seasoned observers on the architectural circuit the simultaneous presence of Robert Venturi and Rem Koolhaas in Las Vegas suggested a gun-toting showdown in the best Wild West tradition. The city has long been Venturi’s favourite stomping ground, ever since the publication of Learning from Las Vegas, the seminal text he wrote with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour in 1972. These were the people who claimed the discovery of a modern American vernacular architecture in the neon signs that sprouted like brightly coloured cacti under the sweltering Nevada desert sun.

Las Vegas’s strange evolution from the illegal 1950s haunt of men with wide lapels and thin moustaches to one of the fastest growing cities in America has fascinated numerous architects and urban theorists, who watch it mutate, like some strange laboratory virus. In the 1950s, on his weekend jaunts to Las Vegas, Frank Sinatra flew over a town of 25,000 inhabitants. Today, some 35 million international visitors jet every year into a city of 1.4 million residents.

The scene of this intriguing encounter was the opening of the Las Vegas Guggenheim and the Guggenheim Hermitage, two art museums carved out of the marzipan confection known as the Venetian Hotel. Designed by Rem Koolhaas and his team at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, both spaces signify the arrival of a new intelligence in this nest of one-armed bandits. The former, a large cube-like space formed out of a void adjacent to the Venetian Hotel – one of the city’s more recent forays into the absurd – resembles an aircraft hangar, with a huge hinged metal door running from floor to ceiling, painted with bold chevron stripes in orange and black, taking up one side of the room.

Opening onto a service area, the door enables large sculptures to be hoisted into the exhibition space with the large steel crane the architects have slung high across from one side of the void to the other. A large trench bisects the smooth concrete floor, offering a lengthy basement gallery accessed on one long side by a processional flight of lime-coloured concrete steps. This trench may be covered over with steel and glass panels to provide a full-width exhibition or performance platform as required.

Visitors walking from the adjacent car park into the Venetian Hotel at first-floor level pass through a glass-fronted gallery that cuts tangentially through part of the exhibition space; the legend ‘Guggenheim Las Vegas’ is etched full height on this glass wall, permitting occasional glimpses through to the space below. The space is topped by a phalanx of factory-style skylights, and the glare of the Nevada sun is filtered by a vast telescoping blind depicting a reproduction of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, with the section devoted to God creating Adam at the centre. Here Koolhaas makes his most explicitly ironic reference to high art and, by implication, to his own powers of creation.
It is a rare moment of exegesis in a project that, through its use of plain materials and abject avoidance of the fake grandeur of the surrounding casino architecture, more generally expresses a reductive functionalism. This project is about the recovery of a space from nothing rather than a projection of an idea into space a condition that prevails throughout Las Vegas.

Bang in the middle of this rather discreet activity lands Frank Gehry’s baroque installation for the Guggenheim’s twice reheated exhibition "The Art of the Motorcycle", an intelligently articulated examination of the design history of motorbikes. Koolhaas, when asked about the conjunction of Gehry’s trademark silver mirrored swoops with his own architecture, murmurs that his space is designed to manage the presence of such work. Showy, dramatic and instantly recognisable, Gehry’s design perfectly understands the popular appeal of Las Vegas.

While the Guggenheim Hermitage is located a five-minute wander away through a jangling forest of gambling machines filling the ground floor of the Venetian Hotel, its relationship to the other gallery space is subtle yet evident. Consisting of a long, low gallery inserted at ground level into the front facade of the hotel, it represents, in both size and shape, the space excavated to form the trench in the Las Vegas Guggenheim. But while the other museum presents no external facade – using the enclosing buildings around it as a form of camouflage – this gallery boasts a skin of Cor-Ten steel on its external and internal walls. This butch material is here given a discreet sealing patina that suggests richly waxed leather.

Partially wedged into the hotel like some prosthetic device and presenting a long wall to the public driveway outside, the gallery hovers in a strange state, half gripped by the corporate embrace of the hotel while staking a claim to the public realm. The small bookshop tacked onto one end of the gallery, sheathed in simple plastic sheeting, cuts boldly into the theatrical baroque cornicing of the hotel foyer, leaving no doubt as to the intrusion of this gallery – a concentrated dose of contemporary architecture and exquisite engineering – into the existing building. It’s as if a hammer has been dropped onto a large meringue pie.

But there is no mess. Inside this metal casket – the gallery is effectively a giant safe – is a collection of 45 stunning paintings by artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Derain, Bonnard and others that come from the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. The dried-blood brown of the Cor-Ten walls provides an effective backdrop to the sparkling colours of these works, which have retained the dazzling freshness they had when they were first collected by the Russian connoisseur Sergei Shchukin before the First World War. The architects have created an ingenious solution to the problem of implementing a versatile hanging facility: magnets fixed to the backs of these valuable works clamp the frames hard to the steel walls. The effect is like entering a jewel box, replete with fabulous gems laid out for delectation.

Whether the Duane Hanson look-alikes trundling through the gambling rooms will be able to tell the difference between the knick-knacks on sale in the gaudy boutiques outside the gallery and the genuine works of art inside is unknown, but even Thomas Krens, the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the man responsible for this extraordinary cultural collision, admits that many visitors to the casino may find the distinction rather challenging.