Jury Citation

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.

Marina Bay Sands’ urban design approach is organised around two principal axes, and 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 is fast becoming an internationally recognised landmark of Singapore and serves as a new gateway to the Central Business District.

Nominator Citation

LUKITO NUGROHO
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER
AEDAS PTE LTD

Marina Bay Sands is a $5 billion, high-density, mixed-use integrated resort that brings together a 2,560-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, internationally renowned architect Moshe Safdie for the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, the 929,000 square meter 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.”

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 feet) multi-level retail arcade, and the iconic ArtScience Museum on the promontory. Located along the network of public paths are also two theaters with a combined 4,000 seats, a casino, a 9,000 square meter (96,000 square feet) convention and exhibition center, and a hydraulically adjustable public event piazza of 5,000 square meters (54,000 square feet). 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 one hectare (2.5-acre) SkyPark. An engineering marvel 200 meters (656 feet) above the sea, the SkyPark spans from tower to tower and cantilevers 65 meters (213 feet) beyond. It accommodates a public observatory, gardens, a 151 meter-long (495 feet-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 monumental 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.