LAS VEGAS — The ultimate human intervention in the landscape.

In René Magritte's painting The Treachery of Images he has included the words Ceci n'est pas une pipe–This is not a pipe. He poses the paradox that the painting is not a pipe but an image of a pipe. Las Vegas is a city internationally known for gambling, shopping and entertainment, it exists as a kind of giant movie set. It is here that intervention in the landscape is taken to the extreme. Using staging, engineering and technology, Las Vegas has created the enter-scape (entertainment / landscape). Malls have hourly thunderstorms, stop for a quick picture in front of the largest manmade waterfall, catch the evening volcanic eruption, see the Venetian canals, dancing fountains, or the sights and smells of a street in Paris or New York. Americans want a landscape that performs and even Old Faithful has been impacted by earthquakes and vandalism affecting its reliability. Las Vegas delivers the lava, nightly, on time and you don't have to run for your life.