May 11--At The Isle casino in Pompano Beach, the party is in full swing. Dance tunes thumping, neon lights flashing, slot machines clanging -- this is jokers-wild, Ocean's Eleven, momma-needs-a-new-pair-of-shoes territory, long enshrined in American culture.

But the spontaneous, unscripted feel of the casino is actually a thoroughly planned creation of casino designers -- part art, part science.

"You want a combination of arousal plus pleasure, which equals excitement," explained Anthony Lucas, an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who has studied the relationship between environmental psychology and casino design. "That's the central emotion. Excitement."

Three Miami-Dade County companies are gearing up to build slot-machine casinos like those in Broward County. Flagler Dog Track, Calder Race Course and Miami Jai-Alai won voter approval in January to expand into slots -- a bet that the often struggling gambling establishments hope will pay off.

Today's casino designers say a casino has to be comfortable but not boring. Exciting but not maddening. Pleasurable -- illicit-feeling, even -- yet safe.

Customers, for the most part, are blissfully unaware of all that.

"Do I pay attention to what it looks like? Not really," said Craig Matthews, 55, a phone-company engineer from Palm Beach County.

He punched the button on the quarter slot machine, as The Offspring's Pretty Fly (For a White Guy) pumped through the casino's speakers. "It's just to have fun and pass some time."

THE PERFECT PLAN

Much of casino design information is a well-guarded secret. Casino companies pay millions of dollars for the perfect casino plan, and they won't give away the details, but this much is known:

No, casinos do not pump extra oxygen into the gaming room to make customers play longer.

No clocks on the casino floor? Still mostly true, although that may be changing.

No daylight to distract gamblers? Becoming less and less true.

Lucas says research has shown that some of the most successful casinos combine high-end glitz with natural elements like waterfalls and greenery -- the feng shui of feeling like a winner.

"Human beings are very drawn to that," he said. "The blinking lights and dazzling effects . . . offer the arousal portion of it. The natural elements like water features and trees are pleasurable to look at."

Gone are most of the dark, low-ceiling, cloistered casinos of old, dubbed by at least one architect as the "nocturnal sensory deprivation model." Most casinos today are vast open spaces that include a never-before-seen feature like a golden "tree of prosperity" at the Wynn Macau or an erupting volcano at The Mirage in Las Vegas.

Casino designers call it a "wow feature," and it works -- sometimes literally.

'My first word was 'wow,' " offered Vicki Griffin, 36, a nurse from Sunrise visiting The Isle casino for the first time recently.

"It's well done. It's elegant. It's very Vegas-style," she said.

DAY AND NIGHT

Casinos have to feel exciting at all hours and cater to changing crowds. Older patrons generally come during the day, while nighttime customers are often younger.

"You don't want to establish a space that only works in the day or at night," said Ethan S. Nelson, president of Steelman Partners, a leading Las Vegas design firm with casino resort projects as far away as Macau and Helsinki.

"We try to always include a daytime attraction," he said. "All the successful casinos have these. . . . It can be a certain piece of art, a $10 million chandelier, an animated effect, a video or water feature or aquarium -- a feature that recognizes that people are coming in and out of the facility all the time."

At The Isle, the newest and highest revenue generating of three Broward County "racinos" that opened in the past two years, the theories are on full display. Purple neon lighting and glittery glass columns stimulate the senses, but warm wood tones and trickling waterfalls promise relaxation in equal measure.

High ceilings reduce noise bounce-back, although cranked-up music and the simulated clink-clink of jackpots still dominate. Curving walkways beckon patrons inward, but exits are easy to find -- there are no old-style, deliberately mazelike casino floors here.

The "wow"? A sleek two-story atrium with twisted, glass "tree trunks" and water trickling into a zen-looking black stone pool surrounded by real tropical greenery.

Nearby, a circular bar presides above the gaming floor, surrounded by enormous white "sails" that appear suspended in air. The sails, which are huge video screens, sport earthy themes: a flower blooming, a droplet of water falling from a leaf, the vivid green plumage of a parrot.

From the first floor or the second, sight lines are built so patrons can grasp the space with a casual scan of the room, something the building's architects like to call "putting geography into a building."

"Customers feel comfortable in an environment if they can understand it very quickly after arriving in a venue . . . and don't feel intimidated," explained David Matthews, a director at Carey Jones, architects and interior designers of The Isle casino.

IS IT NOTICED?

All the effort may be lost on some patrons, deep in the thrall of The Isle's whirling slots.

"I don't pay attention too much," said Estelle Duggan, 70, who winters in South Florida and spends the rest of the year in Connecticut.

But others say they do feel at ease.

"It's comfortable," noted Pat Walker, 55, an administrator who lives in Wellington and has played slots at four other area casinos. "There's enough space. You're not on top of each other. It's light and airy in here, not dark. You feel safe."

Designers and casino operators say that as long as customers feel good about the place, it doesn't matter whether they notice why.

"You can look at design and it has to answer two questions -- first, is it functional, and second is what amenities are you going to utilize to create an experience?" said Seminole Gaming's chief executive officer, Jim Allen. The Hollywood-based Seminole Tribe, owner of the Hard Rock casinos near Hollywood and Tampa, has built a gambling empire, with revenue estimated at $1 billion or more.

Allen says that how a casino achieves success "is totally driven by market and customers."

In the South Florida market, Carey Jones, the architectural company with offices in London and New York, had an additional challenge. Like the other casinos in Broward and those yet to be constructed in Miami-Dade, The Isle had to build into its plan gambling that already existed on the site. In this case, it's a harness-racing track.

"The racing crowd is quite different from the gaming crowd," said David Matthews of Carey Jones. "The racing crowd tend to prefer poker to slots -- and slots customers don't really integrate with the track side at all."

Today's casinos are entertainment centers, not just gambling ventures. Food, drink, retail stores and live entertainment have become as important -- in both revenue and customer expectations -- as the gambling.

"This is a really exciting time to be doing what we're doing," said Nelson, of Steelman Partners. "There are more casinos than ever before, and there's a lot more interest in casinos now. In a certain sense, it was seen as kind of a fringe design niche, and now it's become more and more mainstream."

The increased competition and diversity have been good for design, Nelson said.

"You can't just get away with the old simple slot houses anymore," he said.

"You want to arrange it in a way that encourages people to walk about the entire casino floor and explore. You want to encourage spontaneity."

SLOTS AND JAI-ALAI

One South Florida casino that will have a unique aspect is Miami Jai-Alai, where the traditional Basque ball game will play a central role.

"It's somewhat spectacular to enter the stadium where they play the actual jai-alai game," said Timothy Haahs, chief executive officer of Timothy Haahs & Associates, the architecture and engineering firm for Miami Jai-Alai's casino project. "I think people should be able to visualize that something else exists when they walk into the lobby, maybe get a glimpse of the game through one wall of the casino side. . . . I want people to see it and say, "Wow!" View Larger Map

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