Marina Bay Sands Stunning Archtecture Wins Design Award

Marina Bay Sands

Marina Bay Sands skilfully weaves together the complex range of uses, from hotel, shops and exhibition convention to entertainment, into a stunning building for the new downtown of Singapore

Even though I have never been to Singapore, I am continually amazed by the visual appearance of Marina Bay Sands in all the photos and videos I see of it. Our daughter recently holidayed in Singapore, and specifically chose the Marina Bay Sands Hotel to stay in for its stunning appearance. (Click on High in the Sky at Marina Bay Sands Hotel in Singa...  to read the article she wrote about her stay at the Marina Bay Sands.)

Marina Bay Sands’ urban design approach is organised around two principal axes – three vertical towers and a horozonatl bridging rooftop. It places a strong emphasis on connectivity and the flow of people throughout its premises. To accommodate the intensive needs of the hotel, three towers were built instead of a typical singular structure. This has resulted in creating a new icon for Singapore. Sited prominently along the Marina Bay, these majestic towers provide a unique frame to breathtaking views from the city and the sea. The SkyPark has also become a new urban space, with stunning views of Singapore’s skyline. Marina Bay Sands has won the prestigious President's Design Award 2011.

Marina Bay Sands is a high-density, mixed-use integrated resort that brings together a 2,561-room hotel, convention center, shopping and dining, theaters, museum, and a casino across the water from Singapore’s Central Business District.  Led by Aedas as the Lead Consultant/ Executive Architect and designed by Boston-based architect Moshe Safdie, the 929,000 square meter (10 million square-foot) urban district anchors the Singapore waterfront, creates a gateway to Singapore, and provides a dynamic setting for a vibrant public life.

The project was delivered in less than five years from the inception of design to completion, a record-breaking and very aggressive implementation schedule managed and led by Aedas, working in collaboration with more than 1000 consultants across the globe to produce more than one million drawings for this project.

 

“Marina Bay Sands is really more than a building project, it is a microcosm of a city rooted in Singapore’s culture, climate, and contemporary life,” says architect Moshe Safdie. “Our challenge was to create a vital public place at the district-urban scale, in other words, to address the issue of megascale and invent an urban landscape that would work at the human scale.”

Marina Bay Sands

Safdie designed an urban structure that weaves together the components of a complex program into a dynamic urban crossroads and public meeting place. Inspired by great ancient cities that were ordered around a vital public thoroughfare, Marina Bay Sands is organized around two principal axes that traverse the district and give it a sense of orientation placing emphasis on the pedestrian street as the focus of civic life. This new urban place integrates the waterfront promenade, a 74,000 square meter (800,000 square-foot) multi-level retail arcade, and the iconic museum on the promontory. Located along the network of public paths are also two theaters with a combined capacity of 4,000 seats, a casino, a 120,000 square meter (1.3 million square-foot) convention and exhibition center, and an adjustable public event plaza that can accommodate 10,000 people.

Combining indoor and outdoor spaces and providing a platform for a wide array of activities, this vibrant, 21st-century cardo maximus, or grand arcade, also connects to the subway and other transportation.

A series of layered gardens provide ample green space throughout Marina Bay Sands, extending the tropical garden landscape from Marina City Park towards the Bayfront. The landscape network reinforces urban connections with the resort’s surroundings and every level of the district has green space that is accessible to the public. Generous pedestrian streets open to tropical plantings and water views. Half of the roofs of the hotel, convention center, shopping mall, and casino complex are planted with trees and gardens.

Three 55-storey hotel towers anchor the district and are connected at the top by the 1 hectare (2.5- acre) Sands SkyPark. An engineering marvel 200 meters (656 feet) above the sea, the SkyPark spans from tower to tower and cantilevers 66.5 meters (213 feet) beyond. It accommodates a public observatory, gardens, a 150 meter-long (495 foot-long) swimming pool, restaurants, and jogging paths and offers sweeping panoramic views, a formidable resource in a dense city like Singapore.

Shielded from the winds and lavishly planted with hundreds of trees, the SkyPark celebrates the notion of the Garden City that has been the underpinning of Singapore’s urban design strategy.

Moshe Safdie selected five international artists to create eight public art installations for Marina Bay Sands (James Carpenter, Antony Gormley, Ned Kahn, Sol LeWitt, and Chongbin Zheng). The artists worked closely with Safdie to ensure that the site-specific commissions complement the architecture and energize the public spaces.

Marina Bay Sands

Marina Bay Sands is fast becoming an internationally recognised landmark of Singapore and serves as a new gateway to the Central Business District.
 

To read about all the Marina Bay Sands has to offer see the official website http://www.marinabaysands.com