Liz Light checks out Singapore waterfront's audacious architecture.
It's weirdly thrilling to be swimming in a pool in a leafy park 200m above Singapore. The giant pool has a 150m infinity edge and I wonder what will stop me, on a bad day, from swimming up to that edge and rolling over it to splat on Singapore far below.
Stretching longer than the Eiffel Tower is tall, the Sands SkyPark is supported by three hotel towers and has a gravity-defying cantilever hanging for 56m over air. It's an engineering marvel featured on National Geographic's Megastructure programme, and Auckland-based BECA project-managed its construction.
The vast Marina Bay Sands complex, in the central business district, has forever changed Singapore visually, just as the Sky Tower changed Auckland. It includes a hotel with 2560 rooms in three 55-storey towers; a large art and science museum resembling a lotus flower; a convention centre with space for 45,000 delegates and a ballroom big enough to hold 11,000 people.
There is a 300-unit shopping mall, filled with international designer brands, exclusive restaurants and two theatres. The casino is discrete and elegant (Singapore's Government isn't interested in Vegas-style tackiness) and there is gorgeous giant-sized artwork liberally spread through the complex.
Over the top of all this is the SkyPark - the piece de resistance. It's 340m long and covers 12,000sq m as it stretches like a long aluminium ship hull across the top of the three towers to terminate in an elegant pointed tip, the world's largest cantilever platform. It has more than 300 trees in lush gardens and the curved infinity-edge swimming pool in which I swim.
World-renowned Canada-based Israeli architect Moshe Safdie, at 72, was not afraid to think big, high and outrageous. The government, happy to outdo Dubai with audacious architecture, loved his concept and helped bring it to reality.
Tony McKee, BECA's project manager for the SkyPark project, says Safdie wasn't sure that building the cantilevered northern end was possible and "it took the team a year of planning to finalise the way to do it. The steel supporting the cantilever included two 76m-long box girders, each weighing 760 tonnes. These were lifted in tandem over 13 hours".
This lift went well but he says his scariest moment was during the tandem lift of the girders that form the bridge between the towers. "There was an earthquake in Sumatra that caused the 350-tonne segments to gently sway. The heavy-lifting gantries were evacuated and there were many very nervous people."
I spend a day in Singapore, on my way to somewhere else, and though I know that Chinatown, Little India and all sorts of other treats are out there, I don't leave Marina Bay Sands. I slack around in my luxurious but elegantly minimal room on the 34th floor, check out the designer shops but can't afford to buy anything, forgo the classy restaurants and have a delicious $5 Indonesian laksa lunch in the mall's basement food hall.
Late in the day, before catching my taxi to the airport, I have another swim in that astonishing pool. I figure out the tricky engineering that stops the suicidal from plummeting over the edge and notice smiling security guards at the door who stop base-jumpers from smuggling in parachutes and doing their thing.
IF YOU GO
Getting there: Singapore Airlines flies from Auckland and Christchurch to Singapore 17 times a week.
Stay: Marina Bay Sands.
Visit: The viewing platform on the cantilever and some of SkyPark's restaurants are open to the public but the pool and gardens are reserved for hotel guests.
