Stuff dreams are made of...

The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games provided China with the ideal platform to showcase highly elaborate world-class architectural designs.

Now, with Zaha Hadid Architects’ new ‘City of Dreams’ project set to open in Macau in 2017, the country can add another unique structure to its architectural portfolio.

To be built by casino and resort developer Melco Crown Entertainment, the City of Dreams Hotel was recently unveiled as the company’s flagship property in Cotai, Macau. 

 

A former Portuguese colony, Macau has since December 1999 been a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. 

The territory’s economy is heavily dependent on gambling and tourism.  

The new Macau hotel features a mix of 780 guest rooms, suites and sky villas. 

Spread over 40 floors with a gross floor area of 150,000 sq m, the tower provides guests with an extensive array of amenities, including gaming rooms, event spaces and a spa. 

The oddly-skinned structure by Zaha Hadid Architects, with its white elastic wrapping element, features an exterior narrative similar to the Beijing Olympics National Stadium (popularly called the ‘Bird’s Nest’). 

Although the underlying box shape of the City of Dreams is simple, the bridge elements joining the project’s gaping centre hole are of a more biomorphic influence. 

According to the architects, the external façade was not only designed to optimise the interior programming, but to aesthetically fit in with Macau’s reworked Cotai Strip.

“The rectangular outline of the site is extruded as a monolithic block with a series of voids which carve through the centre of the tower, merging traditional architectural elements, like the roof, wall and ceiling, to create a sculptural form that defines most of the hotel’s internal spaces,” say the architects. 

Planning and design of the City of Dreams project started in 2013, with an anticipated opening date sometime in early 2017.