Las Vegas doesn’t run on logic. It runs on neon, grease, and spectacle. Set within a reimagined desert terrain carved into casino floorplans, Heat Maps, Grease Traps proposes a closed-loop agro-diner where food production is
powered by heat, excess, and performance. Neon signage cooks. Slot machines power irrigation.
The landscape feeds itself. The plateaus are lifted
directly from the casino floorplan case studies in
Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas. Each casino plan
becomes a topographic object, a raised surface that absorbs, concentrates, and releases heat. Their forms generate distinct thermal readings: some behave like
radiators, others like slow-cooling griddles. These
differences register as heat maps, revealing the
invisible metabolism of the desert around them.
A looping, greasy, metabolic infrastructure ↑
Canola oil is harvested, airlifted, and consumed ↑
Placed into an abstracted Las Vegas terrain, the plateaus operate less like architecture and more like energy fields. Their footprints reorganize the ground
into zones of production. The heat they emit drives the canola growth cycle; the harvested oil circulates back across the site,
completing a loop between illumination, agriculture,
and consumption.
The scale is vast, but the logic is small. Each architectural element is scaled up from tabletop: forks become cranes, spatulas become seating, fry baskets become scaffolds. It’s culinary surrealism, rendered infrastructural.
This isn’t just a diner. It’s a system of indulgence and feedback—a greasy loop mapped onto the ground, churning food, power, and delight in equal measure.