MGM Mirage's CityCenter is currently regarded as the biggest privately-financed real estate project in the U.S. It consists of many components large and small, okay mostly large, and they each have been given names long ago. Except one. And it happens to be the main attraction of the entire development sitting on Las Vegas Boulevard.

 The showpiece hotel with over 4,000 rooms housed in two glass towers and a 150,000 square foot casino to keep the patrons busy has jealously managed to guard its future name from the curious, but now the cat is out of the bag. Its official name is Aria. There it is for everyone to spell out and touch.

 The Vdara condo hotel recently celebrated top-off, the first so far to do that of the five high-rise hotel and residential towers. The others coming along later are Mandarin Oriental, Harmon Hotel and Veer Towers, the latter being by the way the only building that is purely residential. Vdara is scheduled to complete in August 2009 and the rest will follow later in stages, leaving Aria the last one to open doors in December 2009. The Crystals is the city-within-a-city's dining, entertainment and retail complex, spread out over 500,000 square feet.

 CityCenter price tag is now estimated at $9.2 billion and the project is a joint venture of MGM Mirage and Dubai World. One noteworthy aspect here is the LEED certification from U.S. Green Building Council that the resort is to striving to achieve. It can be accomplished with a sustainable design. To get there the project is incorporating creative processes on site development, energy efficiency, materials usage, indoor air quality and water savings.