Born in 1936, architect Joel Bergman spent his childhood in Venice, California, the son of Edythe Klein and Harry Bergman, a baker who later turned to dealing in scrap metal. The award-winning designer of such Las Vegas projects as the International Hotel, the MGM Grand Hotel (later Bally's), additions to the Riviera Hotel and the Golden Nugget downtown, the Mirage, Treasure Island, Paris Casino Resort, Caesars Palace, Trump International Hotel and Tower, the Signature at MGM Grand, Rhumbar, Gilley's at Treasure Island, and the Tropicana Hotel and Casino first arrived in Las Vegas in 1968 to work on the International Hotel. In this interview, Bergman discusses his architectural career, which began with his graduation in architecture from the University of Southern California; he also discusses his work with Martin Stern, his sixteen years with Steve Wynn, and the formation of his own architectural firm, Bergman Walls and Associates. Throughout, he pays tribute to the three mentors who had the greatest influence on his work—USC architecture professor Carleton Winslow, architect Berton Severson, and client Steve Wynn—and the ways they visualized people moving through space. He acknowledges other professionals whose work he admired and talks about his wives Marlene Federman, Terrie Colston, Maria Nicolini, and Valentina Bogdanova as well as his children and stepchildren. Joel David Bergman passed away August 24, 2016, three weeks after he gave this interview.

In 1984, with the advice of his father ringing in his ears, Brad Nelson uprooted his wife and two children from their Denver home and moved them to Henderson, Nevada, where he would begin a new adventure in shaping the new master-planned community of Green Valley with Mark Fine and American Nevada Corporation (ANC). Nelson, lifelong Nebraskan and only child of his parents, arrived armed with a Bachelor's degree in landscape architecture with urban planning option, a Master's degree in urban planning, and fifteen years of planning and executive experience with the national firm of Harmon, O'Donnell and Henniger Planning Consultants. He arrived in time to plan Green Valley's first village, the Village of Silver Spring. By the time he left ANC for Lake Las Vegas in 1999, his work was done and most large parcels had been sold. As Nelson puts it, by 1999 ANC was "out of land, and I'm a land guy." Lake Las Vegas had plenty of undeveloped land, so "land guy" Nelson a chief operating officer

Anna Peltier, owner and founder of ARIA Landscape Architecture in Las Vegas, Nevada, is a transplanted farm girl and a musician. She was born in 1978 on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in Escanaba, Michigan, where she and two brothers were the second generation to grow up on their parents’ (and formerly their grandparents’) farm. She studied music performance at Michigan State University but after discovering her love of landscape architecture early in her college career, she changed majors and earned her degree in landscape architecture. Moving to Las Vegas in 2007, she first worked for JW Zunino Landscape Architects. While with Zunino she did design work for Lorenzi Park and designed the award-winning Cactus Avenue Interchange. As ARIA’s principal designer, Anna designed Discovery Park in Pahrump, Nevada, and the USA Parkway between Lake Tahoe, California, and Reno, Nevada. In 2013, when Anna opened ARIA, she carefully chose the name of her business. First, for practical reasons she want

In 1978 Bill Snyder came Las Vegas for a heavyweight championship fight between his homeboy, Larry Holmes and Ken Norton. During that visit, he saw cranes dotting the cityscape so he returned home and proposed that the family move across country and settle in the desert. His wife, Joy, gave him a year. And as they say, the rest is history. And what am amazing history it is. In this interview, Bill Snyder talks about his life from its beginning in Easton, Pennsylvania, where he discovered the challenge of architecture first by perusing books in the library and then by hands-on construction experience. But his love of art built the foundation to this treasured craft that has allowed him to design homes, office buildings, airport terminals and the McCaw School of Mines on the campus of McCaw Elementary School in Henderson, NV. The projects that Mr. Snyder seems to prize most are those that include the imagination of children. The people who shaped his life are introduced and the impact of his military training is wonderfully expressed. His connection with young people is paramount throughout the oral history that is beautifully documented with images of many of the projects that displayed children's art in an exciting way. Bill and Joy are the parents of two sons. Dana age 36, lives with his wife Christine in Hollywood, California, and works as a voice actor best known for his role as Master Shake on the cartoon Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Their younger son, Mike age 31, owns The Krate, a clothing, music, and art shop in Santa Cruz, California, where he lives with his wife Mandy and daughter Maya. A husband, father, sports car enthusiast, runner, thinker and lover of teaching and trusting young people, Bill Snyder is a brilliant architect and manager of people. He is dyslectic and never expected a school to be named in his honor but the William E. Snyder Elementary School was dedicated in 2001 with overwhelming community support. One of his current goals is to dream an architectural project that rivals the McCaw School of Mines for his own school. I trust that you will learn to love architecture in a different and very profound way as you read this interview just as I did during my conversation with Bill.

Lee Cagely, an interior designer and professor who designed some of the most iconic hotels in Las Vegas, Nevada, was born in the Panama Canal Zone on January 31, 1951. His father Leo was a civil engineer for the Panama Canal Company and his mother Charlotte worked as a receptionist. After his father left his job in Panama, Lee spent his childhood in Dallas, Texas; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Des Moines, Iowa. He started to attend Rice University for architecture, but he chose to leave before completing his degree. He returned to college a few years later and graduated from Iowa State University with a degree in interior design in 1975. While his first California jobs were in restaurant design, he quickly moved on to airports and hotels and moved to Las Vegas in 1990 after associating with Marnell Architecture. Cagley is known for his designs in the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino, Ceasars Palace Atlantic City, the Mirage, and the Bellagio Resort & Casino. He is currently Chair of the Iowa State University College of Design and is principal designer for Lee Cagely Design. Here, Cagley explains the importance of keeping the various pieces of the infrastructure of a resort—including landscape architecture, architecture, interior design, all kinds of HVAC [heating, ventilation and air conditioning] concerns, housekeeping, food service, maintenance, etc.-invisible in order to maximize the visitor experience. At the same time he illustrates through several examples how resort design does not happen in a vacuum-it is instead part of a complex team that works together to create the whole. He also describes the challenges the Las Vegas resort industry finds in creating the very best visitor experience for a broad range of groups-from Millennials to their Boomer grandparents and all the generations in between.