Our Double-sided Television
November 2023
(Reading Time: 4 min)
(Reading Time: 4 min)
I scroll on Instagram a lot. A bottom-truncated yellow orb with googly eyes flew through my smartphone screen. I swiftly scrolled back, trying to catch another glimpse. It was a video clip of a city’s aerial view at night. The blob’s intense, saturated yellow glow made the surrounding city lights look faint. It’s hard to make up the size of the glare, but it occupied over half of my screen’s real estate. In the background of the video, there was the Eiffel Tower and another tall building with a sign that reads ‘PALAZZO’ mounted vertically on its façade. Then the googly eyes blinked. I was hooked. I could not stop thinking about it ever since.
This scaleless, round-shaped light source is The Sphere in Las Vegas. It is a building (or not). Construction started back in 2018, and it had its grand opening a couple months ago, in 2023. The Sphere is record-breaking on multiple fronts. It is the most expensive entertainment venue in the city—a price tag of 2.3 billion dollars—thanks to the global supply chain crisis and inflation during the pandemic. It is the largest sphere the world has ever constructed, boasting a diameter of 500 feet. The interior of the sphere has the largest screen with the highest resolution ever. The exterior is a spherical matrix of LED displays that is programmable for anything. It is the moon, Mars, planet Earth, an eye, a tennis ball, a snow globe, an aquarium, a jack-o-lantern, an endless loop of a cat chasing a laser dot, or just a cartoonish face that sneers at its surroundings. But when the lights get snuffed out, it is a blackhole, a puddle of nothingness from the face of the earth. The Sphere is horrendous as a building, and it is also really, really good.
James L. Dolan, the founder and chairman of Madison Square Garden Entertainment, owns The Sphere in Las Vegas. The entertainment magnate controls the most iconic venues in the country, including Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, and the Chicago Theatre. Mr. Dolan also owns both the New York Knicks and the New York Rangers. His most recent stubborn investment, The Sphere in Las Vegas, is his bet on the future of entertainment outside of his home base. With Las Vegas being the first abode of the universal sphere, London is coming up next on his agenda to feed the insatiable appetite of capitalism.
Now, spherical buildings are not new. Humanity’s obsession with imagining and constructing the immaculate volume as a building can be traced back to Newton’s Cenotaph, envisioned by Boullée in the late 18th century. Boullée envisaged a utopian construct that is dedicated to Isaac Newton, using perfect and pure geometry on the grandest scale he could imagine. Newton’s Cenotaph was 500 feet tall, which is the same size as The Sphere. It was a hefty monument. Arguably, the severance from the interior and the exterior experiences also foreshadowed The Sphere centuries later. Boullée’s vision, even though it was never realized, aimed for the sublime.
Fast-forward to one and a half centuries later, Buckminster Fuller proposed the spheres as a concept again. First, he suggested a giant dome over Manhattan to enclose parts of New York City in 1959. The size of the dome was a little less than 2 miles in diameter. As radical as the notion was, the key was to provide a closed system to maximize energy efficiency. Eight years later, Buckminster Fuller realized the dome on a smaller scale in Montreal—the US Pavilion for Expo ‘67. The transition from Boullée to Buckminster Fuller represents a shift from heavy to lightweight and from monolithic to transparent. Nonetheless, both the Manhattan Dome and the Montreal Biosphere are epitomes of closed systems utilizing spheres.
Then, corporations started to entertain the idea of spherical buildings. In 1982, The Walt Disney Company took inspiration from Buckminster Fuller’s domes and built EPCOT’s Spaceship Earth. Here, the sphere became monolithic again. The closed world belongs to businesses; it is customizable and liberated from the outside world. In Seattle, Amazon commissioned a new headquarters that fuses three spheres into one, also colloquially known as “Bezo’s Balls”. It opened in 2018. Two years later, Apple opened a new retail store in Singapore: a sphere floating on water designed by Foster and Partners. The sphere now lies in the egos of corporations.
From sublime to closed worlds to corporation egos, The Sphere encompasses all the above. The innate gravity that comes with the volume absorbed it all. Even though The Sphere’s interior and exterior are both screens, they present two parallel universes. One side is intended for ticketed individuals, and the curved screen engulfs the audience. On the other side, the images that are constantly in motion attack the public’s senses aggressively. As passersby, we encounter light pollution, and traffic gets bogged down because we get distracted. A polarity of experiences. There is only one thing in common for both screens—they are both programmable controlled by the same entity.
However, when we turn to the public’s reception of The Sphere from Google Maps reviews, Instagram, and Twitter (or X), people adore the experiences. With more than 2,000 reviews on Google Maps, The Sphere carries a rating of 4.4 out of 5—most reviews praised the immersive experience of the closed world and the infinite possibilities of projections on the exterior. On Instagram and Twitter (or X), the memes and jokes on The Sphere become entertainment for all. If one labels The Sphere as architecture, maybe it has succeeded in making the discipline less serious and more enjoyable. After all, who can resist the blinking googly eyes and the watery puppy eyes on the adorable yellow blob?
It is too naïve to say The Sphere is a disappointment to how humanity has progressed. It is too pessimistic to say that The Sphere is a testament to the decay of reality. Instead, it might be more productive to posit that The Sphere is the status quo. Our obligation is to comprehend it and accept it. It is true that the world is polarized like two screens. When there are ongoing wars on one side of the world, the other side is splurging on U2 concert tickets at The Sphere. We live in a world with no middle ground and no compromises. We live in a world in constant oscillation between the real and the virtual. The Sphere presents the world as it is—the reality that we live parallel lives simultaneously. That is why it is really, really good.