The world’s first guitar-shaped hotel, with a price tag estimated at $1.5 billion, opened in Hollywood, Fla., late last month.
The 450-ft-tall 34-story Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, sitting on 34 acres, includes 638 music-themed guest rooms and suites, a 12,000-sf rooftop bar, 14 on-site restaurants, more than 20 shops, a lagoon called Bora Bora, and a 6,556-seat, 225,000-sf multipurpose theater called Hard Rock Live, designed by the Canadian firm Scéno Plus, that alone cost an estimated $125 million. (A concert by the rock group Maroon 5 opened this venue on October 25.)
Klai Juba Wald Architecture & Interiors designed the hotel, Giovanetti Shulman Associates and Arup were engineers on this project, and Suffolk Construction the GC. The hotel/casino is owned through Hard Rock International by the Seminole Tribe of Florida.
The building’s façade is outfitted with 2.3 million LEDs, video mapping and lasers, capable of creating a multitude of visual effects and presentations. Boston-based custom fabricator Design Communications LTD (DCL) managed, directed, engineered, and installed the LEDs and power systems provided by SACO, with generative and sound-reactive content created by Float4 using Realmotion 4 Karat Gold Series servers. SmartMonkeys provided an integrated scheduling and automation control platform called ISAAC.
Float4 created generative and sound-reactive content for the hotel's exterior lighting effects using Realmotion servers.
The facade has five core elements that can each be used for specific effects:
•The Front & Back are the main sections on which dynamic content can be video mapped.
•The Outline delineates the edges of the guitar shape, and content plays with this aspect by hiding and revealing the guitar’s contours.
•The Sides enhance the illusion of depth for visual effects
•The Strings, which utilize lasers instead of LEDs, are used to show vertical motion and effects such as fountains, chord strums and string plucks.
•The Spandrel Glass section is ideal for expanding content from the face and body to create the illusion of another level of content.
Videos of the hotel can be viewed here and here.
James Allen, chairman of Hard Rock International, expects the new hotel/casino to attract between 15,000 and 20,000 visitors a day, and up to 45,000 on Saturdays. The project created 2,400 construction jobs, and the facility will employ around 4,000 people.
Related Stories
Reconstruction & Renovation | Aug 21, 2018
The massive facelift of New York’s famed Waldorf Astoria moves into Phase Two
The refurbished hotel will feature fewer, but larger, guest rooms.
Hotel Facilities | Aug 10, 2018
How hospitality design makes spaces of all types better for users
Responding to these shifting expectations, building owners and design teams working in other markets now regularly embrace leading ideas from the world of hospitality and infuse them into their projects.
Hotel Facilities | Aug 1, 2018
'Home away from home' is hoteliers' newest theme
Creating an experience, with the accent on local color, is flavoring hotel design.
Mixed-Use | Jul 17, 2018
Water Street Tampa’s developer reveals details about this project’s public spaces
This $3 billion waterfront neighborhood will also include three hotels.
Sponsored | Hotel Facilities | Jul 13, 2018
Hotel renovation: More than just minding the dust
Do you know the vital signs for avoiding moisture & mold problems? Will your brand standards cause you headaches? How will you recover costs if you do get into trouble?
Adaptive Reuse | Jul 9, 2018
Work, park, live: Inside Cincinnati’s parking garage turned lifestyle hotel
The Summit hotel and conference center is a converted parking garage that was once a factory.
Hotel Facilities | Jun 20, 2018
Zaha Hadid Architects-designed Morpheus Hotel includes world’s first free-form high-rise exoskeleton
The hotel provides 147, 860 sm of space across 42 floors.
| May 30, 2018
Accelerate Live! talk: An AEC giant’s roadmap for integrating design, manufacturing, and construction
In this 15-minute talk at BD+C’s Accelerate Live! conference (May 10, 2018, Chicago), Skender CEO Mark Skender and Chief Design Officer Tim Swanson present the construction giant’s vision for creating a manufacturing-minded, vertically-integrated design-manufacturing-build business model.
| May 30, 2018
Accelerate Live! talk: From micro schools to tiny houses: What’s driving the downsizing economy?
In this 15-minute talk at BD+C’s Accelerate Live! conference (May 10, 2018, Chicago), micro-buildings design expert Aeron Hodges, AIA, explores the key drivers of the micro-buildings movement, and how the trend is spreading into a wide variety of building typologies.
| May 24, 2018
Accelerate Live! talk: Security and the built environment: Insights from an embassy designer
In this 15-minute talk at BD+C’s Accelerate Live! conference (May 10, 2018, Chicago), embassy designer Tom Jacobs explores ways that provide the needed protection while keeping intact the representational and inspirational qualities of a design.
