MGM Blowing Up Brand New Vegas Hotel?

What happens in Vegas is, famously, supposed to stay in Vegas. But some things are just too big to escape the eyes of the outside world, such as MGM Resorts International’s Harmon Building.

The never-opened condo/hotel on the Vegas Strip is part of the $9 billion CityCenter project and was designed by architect Norman Foster, the fella Apple has hired to create its new Apple City in Cupertino.

Foster’s vision here didn’t quite work out, apparently. The project has been “riddled with construction engineering problems,” according to the Wall Street Journal, and MGM would like to simply implode the thing, marking the first time such a huge unused building has suffered such a fate on the Strip if it were to happen.

“The company’s effort to destroy the Harmon, however, is complicated by a legal dispute with CityCenter’s general contractor, Perini Building Co., over roughly $200 million in billings to Perini and other contractors,” the Journal reports. MGM doesn’t want to pay the bills because of the building’s failures, according to the paper.

A court order currently keeps the building from being destroyed, but “CityCenter is hoping that county approval of the demolition plan will help it in seeking relief from that order,” the paper notes.