Las Vegas is a young city, but it’s old enough to have eras. We’ve seen the coming and going of the Rat Pack era, the themed casino era and others, accumulating like rings on a tree. It’s likely that the era we’re living through now will be remembered as the “sports entertainment era,” or potentially, “the era Vegas ran out of housing and/or water.”

However, there’s a real possibility that we’ll remember this period as when Vegas’ casino towers became art, due to advances in LED lighting technology—and more significantly, because of evolving ideas of how that technology can be used.