Between 2008 and 2014 we lived in the Marina Bay district of Singapore, a district built on reclaimed land.

Singapore is a small island city-state with a population of 5.6 million people, situated one degree north of the equator.¹

Given the location in the equatorial tropics, Singapore is consistently hot and humid, and day length only varies about fifteen minutes throughout the year, which led me to lose track of the passage of time.

Our apartment was in a 63-story building (indicated by the red arrow below) and was next to a 70-story sister tower.

We lived on the 49th floor with an expansive view of two significant development projects on the far side of the bay, the Marina Bay Sands and the Gardens by the Bay, completed during our time in Singapore and have become iconic images of Singapore.

Marina Bay Sands Integrated Resort

The first building project to draw our attention was the Marina Bay Sands Integrated Resort because it was directly across Marina Bay from our apartment, and we watched it being built. The resort was designed by Moshe Safdie of Safdie Architects.

The Marina Bay Sands resort in Singapore, designed for the Las Vegas Sands Corp., is one of the most ambitious: The $5.7 billion, 9-million-square-foot program includes a 2,500-room hotel, convention center, casino, retail, dining, nightclubs, event plaza, and museum, all topped by the Sands SkyPark.

Architect Magazine, “Marina Bay Sands”, posted January 3, 2011

We arrived in August 2008, and the building projects had begun but had not risen above the level of the temporary building visible in the photo on the left above. One year later, the three Marina Bay Sands hotel towers were up to the 55th story but not yet complete.

By year-end 2009, the SkyPark was in place atop the three towers. The process of hoisting the pieces to the top is described in Architect Magazine.

The hull was built off-site in 14 separate steel segments. Each was trucked to the site, lifted into place using hydraulic strand jacks, and assembled on top of the towers. The two largest sections were a pair of 262-foot-long, 1,400-ton box girders that formed the 213-foot cantilever. At a lifting speed of 46 feet per hour, it took more than 16 hours to lift the girders and slide them into place.

Architect Magazine, “Marina Bay Sands”, posted January 3, 2011

I watched from my office as the pieces of the SkyPark were slowly raised up, but I didn’t have the chance to photograph the process.

The above image shows the long, curved Shoppes of the Marina Bay Sands complex which are in front of the three hotel towers. We often walked, shopped, and ate in the restaurants there upon completion.

Next to the Shoppes, the ArtScience Museum was also still under construction in mid-December 2009 (behind orange-color scaffolding at left in the photo above).

By mid-2010 the scaffolding had mostly been removed and the unique shape of the ArtScience Museum was revealed.

On weekends, I often went out with my camera before sunrise to photograph the architecture around the Marina Bay Sands complex. The ArtScience Museum was a compelling subject.

The building is supported by a steel lattice diagrid structure and ten steel columns –a sculptural centerpiece that allows the building to seemingly float above. The geometry of the shape is often compared to a lotus, and is clad with fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP), typically used in high-performance racing yachts.

SafdieArchitects.com

The ArtScience Museum is fascinating to photograph in different atmospheric conditions and from varying angles. The above wide view was taken pre-dawn.

During a Singapore arts festival in 2014, the ArtScience Museum had colorful patterns projected onto its surface, presenting an entirely different image.

Gardens by the Bay

The Gardens by the Bay site sits behind the Marina Bay Sands Hotel towers and was designed by the architecture firm Grant Associates.

There are two giant greenhouses at the Gardens by the Bay; the tall one on the left above is the Cloud Forest. The lower, longer one on the right is the Flower Dome—both were completed in 2012.

The Flower Dome provides an indoor environment for plants from the Mediterranean climate and the Cloud Forest is home to endangered species from tropical montane cloud forest.

Grant-Associates.uk.com

We especially appreciated the low humidity of the Flower Dome.

Also in the Gardens by the Bay is a grove of Supertrees connected by an elevated walkway.

18 distinctive Supertrees and 2 cooled Conservatories provide futuristic landmarks and have been instrumental in shaping Singapore’s identity as a ‘City in a Garden’. At night the gardens transform into a popular meeting place to take in the spectacular sound and light show at the Supertree Grove.

Grant-Associates.uk.com

On Christmas Eve 2013, Hideko and I went to the SkyPark atop Marina Bay Sands, and I captured the above view of the Gardens by the Bay, showing the Flower Dome and the Cloud Forest on the left and the SuperTree Grove on the right.

The manual labor for these mega-projects was provided by foreign workers from South Asia. The photo above shows a morning meeting of the crew for one project at the Marina Bay Financial Centre next to our apartment.

I couldn’t find how many foreign workers there were on the Marina Bay projects described in this article. However, the Economist reported in 2013 that there were “about 350,000 [foreign] workers in the booming construction industry alone” (“Trouble in Little India”, The Economist, December 14, 2013).

Lasers & Fireworks

There is a nightly laser light show from the top of the Marina Bay Sands. I never tired of looking out to see the colorful show.

On Singapore National Day in August 2014 I went out onto our tiny balcony and captured the above photo of the fireworks over Marina Bay.

I retired in November 2014, and Hideko and I left Singapore and returned to Oregon with many fond memories of the view of Marina Bay from the 49th floor.

1. As a reference for fellow upper Willamette Valley residents, Singapore would fit in roughly the space between Veneta in the west and Leaburg in the east (about 31 miles wide) and from Coburg in the north and Creswell in the south (about 17 miles). ↩︎