Dan Handel – curator of The Design of Carpets that Design Us, an exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal – reveals why casino carpets are so loud, why what’s underfoot represents an architectural loss of control and what carpets have to do with people-monitoring in space.
‘Just as the Pied Piper of Hamelin lured all the rats and the children to follow him, a properly designed maze entices adult players.’ These words open the book Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition by Bill Friedman, and the maze in point is the ideal gaming environment he imagines as the ultimate profit machine. To achieve that, Friedman meticulously specifies numerous rules for the proper design of these interiors.
The first thing you encounter in the maze is the carpet, and Friedman states that its colour and pattern should be carefully chosen: ‘The carpet is one place brilliant colors can be used . . . reasonably intense colors can amplify players’ excitement as they approach the gambling equipment.’ Most importantly, the carpet should be in good taste, ‘because it is the most pervasive decoration in a casino. Its appearance can enhance the atmosphere, or it can create a strong negative impression.’
Casino carpets are notorious for their loud and obtrusive patterns. Urban legend has it that the patterns are designed to conceal lost casino chips and blood stains, but that is just underestimating their actual function as strategic devices in interiors, meant to move people or disorient them, and to play a role in the creation of a state of euphoria understood to be required for maximum spending.
Entrance to the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas, circa 2008. Photo: Chris Maluszynski
Documentation of casino carpets, 2019. Photo: Dan Handel
Over the past few years I studied these carpets in their host architectures, usually an interconnected hotel/gaming complex, in the attempt to assess not only their appearance but their performance in space. As Friedman’s influential book implies, carpets can be central agents in the psychological manoeuvring of users. The interiors of these projects, among the most lavish and expensive interiors being designed today, tell a complex story about extreme capitalist development, dreams of reinvented self and architectural loss of control.
Loss of control because in most cases, architects, including the most well-known and powerful ones, do not design the carpets in their buildings. My project, now taking the shape of an exhibition, The Design of Carpets that Design Us at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal (through 20 February 2022), set to find out who is designing these carpets and with what motives. Artist Assaf Evron and I traced the designers, industrial companies, brands and financial organizations through which these carpets acquire their final form.
Interior of the Marriott Marquis in Atlanta, 2019. Photo: Assaf Evron
Talking, for instance, to insiders in the hospitality sector brings up the fact that brands such as Hyatt not only own the intellectual property of the designs in their hotels, but that the interior designers of these hotels must go through a process of ‘brand immersion’ in the central headquarters in Chicago in order to conform with the standards and aesthetic ideology dictated for each sub-brand by a team of corporate marketeers. Or, in the gaming industry, designers confessed that the carpets are designed to be changed every year due to the weight of money carts, or that an interior would be torn down and replaced in three months by a new design if it didn’t generate enough revenue. The measuring and tracking of spaces extend to the monitoring of people. Contemporary developments in the casino and hospitality sectors employ surveillance techniques for means that go beyond security and into the realm of mental processes, testing different atmospheres, tactile surfaces, design elements and visual patterns to help people slide into ‘the zone’, that liminal mental state that allows a disconnection from the outside world and a unity with the gambling machine.
But carpets are not always oppressive. Some carpet stories weave together brands, producers and users in unexpected ways. In the exhibition we showcase the Marriott Marquis in Atlanta, a John Portman building, where attendees to the annual Dragon Con convention dress up as the carpet. Calling themselves ‘Cult of the Marriott Carpet’, they meet every year and ceremonially assemble pieces of the carpet, which had since been replaced, in the space of the hotel. With that, they appropriate the pattern designed by the brand to mark the non-conformist spirit of the convention and of the place in which it’s held.
Installation views of The Design of Carpets That Design Us, 2021. Photos: Courtesy of CCA
The carpets in these stories – unrolled over massive spaces, designed by corporate designers according to brand specs, and produced by the powers of proprietary software and patented technologies – are different entities than what we are used to thinking of when we think of a carpet. Disconnected from the constraints of design traditions and independent of the building’s architecture, they spread over the wings of advanced capitalism, covering floors in Las Vegas, Macau or Shanghai, and lure people into the maze in accordance with the grand scheme of moneymaking.
Cover: Interior of the Hyatt O'Hare, 2019. Photo: Assaf Evron
