Bellagio Hotel Fountains
Video Tour

From the Publisher
"This must be the best, the biggest thing you will ever do, in all your life." So challenged Steve Wynn as he, my wife Susan, Claire Khan and I schemed and dreamed over dinner above the Treasure Island Pirate Show one hot, dry night in 1995. We talked not of jet heights or of nozzle quantities. We spoke of lifting the Bellagio away from the strip, of wrapping it in an aura of romance and watery elegance.

Three years later, Steve, Susan, Claire, and I watched the opening night crowd laugh, cry, sing and applaud - moved not by actors or dancers, but by sprays of water, just water. Plumes and streams and misty sprays that, thanks to the genius of the artists and engineers, the designers and craftsmen involved, touch people's emotions and elevate their spirits.

And this will continue as Bobby Baldwin, President of Bellagio, challenges us to touch and to inspire people, to find out what's beyond the biggest, what tops the best. - Mark Fuller, President and CEO of WET Design

Book Description
According to the laws of physics, water occurs in three states—liquid, solid (ice) and gas (mist or fog).

But watching the Fountains of Bellagio, it is quickly apparent that science occasionally must give way to poetry, even when describing the physical aspects of water. Here water exists as music, swaying like a dancer’s arms, rising in a gasp of towering columns or sudden staccato bursts. Here water is a lattice of light, it wreathes the air, shimmies playfully as a showgirl and fans out as a wall of white like the sails of a tall ship blown suddenly full and fast. Here water requires words usually more often associated with mood and personality: majestic, flirtatious, romantic, regretful, and stately even witty.

The fountain is inevitably used as a metaphor for joy. Leaping waters, currents that cascade and dance, these images are as close as many of us come to seeing what is more often felt—the surge of exultation, the flutter of love, the geyser of sudden joy. Yet it is not in the molecular nature of water to leap or dance; it is heavier than air and inanimate. To achieve movement, it must be acted upon by an outside source greater than itself—gravity, or the tug of the moon, heat or a sudden rush of air. The Fountains of Bellagio were designed to be superlative, and not just in size.