Putting the "wow" into Marina Bay Sands™

The Marina Bay Sands™ resort, a new hand that says, "Welcome" at Marina Bay

Practically every tourist, convention delegate or casino high roller will be awed by the cupped, open-palm structure of a new icon that will figure in Singapore's skyline in 2009.

The icon, the ArtScience Museum, is part of a bigger icon - the S$5 billion Marina Bay Sands™ (MBS) resort, the must-see attraction being built by Las Vegas Sands Corp. The 20,500 sqm museum will be sited at one end of MBS, at its Bayfront Promontory.

Also at the resort will be the Sky Park. Set 170 metres above the sea, the one-hectare park, sitting atop three hotel towers, will take your breath away, literally. Picture gorgeous views of the downtown, cityscape and skylines amid 10,000 sqm of gardens with swimming pools, jogging paths and terraces.

Those are the much-touted facts of MBS, which tourism industry practitioners already know. What you probably do not know is that:

• The overlapping palms of the museum took more than 40 models in all to come out right.

• The quandary was whether to start with single or multiple centres (for balance) and whether a "spheroid or squashed ball" concept was correct.

• Setting the Sky Park atop the hotel complex on "soft clay base of the landfill" of the Marina Bay land parcel is a big engineering feat.

In the end, the concept for the museum became a major "tweak of mathematics and geometry", said MBS' chief architect, Mr Moshe Safdie.

"It is not only a question of developing an elegant and efficient structure for greatly cantilevering complex forms, but also a mathematical order which makes it inherently buildable and efficient," Mr Safdie, told P@ssport in an e-mail interview following his lecture, the Moshe Safdie Forum, at the URA Function Hall on 22 May.

Which is why every visitor, delegate and casino spender will appreciate the dish-like roof surface, which funnels rainwater and drains it towards the centre where a natural fountain is formed. And anyone, from Singapore resident to visitor, will be drawn to the rooftop which becomes a tiered-seating amphitheatre for 3,000 people to enjoy Light and Water Shows under the stars every night.

As for challenges for the Sky Park: "It must accomplish the 60-metre cantilever for the observatory, accommodate the differential movement between the (three hotel) towers and lend itself to efficient construction."

No doubt, these facts provide interesting anecdotes for great story-telling during tours to the resort.

But there will be other attractions at the resort too. From an ice-skating rink and indoor canals for water taxis to floating pavilions and, of course, the casino.

Ask Mr Safdie, however, which facets of this "urban sector" will take peoples' breath away, and he will say not one, but all facets.

"Everything about the design of Marina Bay Sands™ is about thinking through the experience with people in it. I cannot single out a particular feature because this philosophy permeates through the design.

"How to make a 2,500-room hotel complex both fun and intimate, the exciting experience with a sense of escape and the uplift the people will get enjoying the Sky Park, be it at the public observatory or seeing the city above the vanishing point at the horizon of the swimming pool.

"I believe that meandering through the Grand Arcade (indoors and outdoors), viewing the city from the amphitheatre roof of the ArtScience Museum, partaking in a convention with a magnificent view of the Bay and downtown from the (convention) areas, walking down the upper promenade overlooking the project from the roof of the casino buildings, all these are people experience elements."

Mr Safdie, an Israeli architect, who has designed iconic buildings and national libraries to airports and whole cities, and his team, Moshe Safdie and Associates, were selected in May 2006 to design MBS, which is being billed as one of the largest investments in the world for a single integrated resort (IR). The resort is expected to pump in an additional $2.7 billion (or about 0.8%) to Singapore's annual Gross Domestic Product and provide about 30,000 jobs throughout the economy by 2015.

In the end, he said, the project as a whole will become a "wow factor".

"While the hotel with its skypark would be 'wow'...the ArtScience Museum is a 'wow', the promenade with the back up of its shopping arcade are unprecedented spaces anywhere in the world.

"It is the sum total that is going to make the Marina Bay Sands™ a memorable and extraordinary place."

Don't miss the Resorts World at Sentosa update in next month's August issue