Downtown Las Vegas
A forgotten downtown became a canvas for art-led revitalization.
Building 180 helped turn a written-off district into a place people wanted to discover.
For decades, downtown Las Vegas lived in the shadow of the Strip. The city’s original core had lost much of its energy, visibility, and public identity.
Then Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project began reimagining the neighborhood through a simple but ambitious idea: that art, community, and intentional placemaking could help bring a city back to life.
Building 180 became part of that transformation, contributing murals, sculptures, custom fabrication, and site-specific art across public spaces, restaurants, bars, hotels, and hospitality interiors.
The art became part of the neighborhood’s new identity, helping downtown feel more vibrant, layered, and alive.
Across downtown Las Vegas, Building 180 worked at two scales at once.
At the neighborhood level, the team helped create a visible creative layer throughout the district, bringing art into the places where people gathered, walked, ate, drank, and explored.
Their work included public art activations, murals, sculptures, interiors, and custom fabrication for venues including Cheapshot and We All Scream. Together, these projects helped give the district a distinct visual identity and a reason for people to keep moving through it.
At the building level, Building 180 brought the same creative approach to specific architectural and hospitality challenges — most notably at the Downtown Grand.
At the Downtown Grand, Building 180 turned a bad view into the main experience.
When the Downtown Grand opened its Gallery Tower, the hotel faced a major design problem: all 260 rooms looked directly into a neighboring building.
Rather than treating the wall as a surface for a standard mural, Building 180 helped commission artist Camila Magraner to create Transmigrations, recognized at the time of installation as the world’s largest augmented reality mural.
Each room received an iPad. When guests held the device up to their window, the blank exterior wall became an animated world, shifting based on the room’s unique vantage point.
The view was no longer a limitation. It became the thing people remembered.
Building 180 transformed hidden infrastructure into a public-facing landmark.
Elsewhere on the property, Building 180 saw opportunity in another unlikely place: the hotel’s massive exterior HVAC structure.
What others saw as an eyesore, Building 180 treated as a canvas.
The team commissioned artist Josef Kristofoletti to create Slat City, a 5,600-square-foot mural painted directly onto the building’s louvered utility structure.
Using color theory across each individual slat, Kristofoletti created a work that only fully comes together at scale — turning mechanical infrastructure into a bold, photogenic landmark visible from the street.
Downtown Las Vegas showed how art can solve problems that standard design cannot.
Building 180’s work in downtown Las Vegas helped support a broader district transformation that drew national attention and proved that art-led revitalization could work beyond San Francisco.
The Downtown Grand’s Gallery Tower launched with press recognition for its art program, including the augmented reality mural that turned 260 hotel rooms into immersive viewing experiences.
Across the neighborhood, murals, sculptures, interiors, and custom installations helped make art part of the district’s everyday identity. The ability to see creative possibility where others see limitations is what makes Building 180 a true strategic partner — for artists, developers, hospitality teams, and civic leaders working to make places feel alive.
