A new development in Chongqing, China is setting a new world record as a “horizontal skyscraper”, and it looks like Marina Bay Sands on steroids.
Raffles City Chongqing, designed by renowned architect Moshe Safdie, is developed by Singapore’s own CapitaLand, whose president and group CEO calls it the “largest and most complex integrated development” ever undertaken by the real estate company by far. The project will hold a shopping mall, residences, offices and a hotel.
Complicated, indeed. The megastructure consists of four 250m-tall skyscrapers topped with a 300m-long curved horizontal sky bridge, which will feature an outdoor patio with see-through glass flooring as a viewing deck. The enclosed structure — longer than Singapore’s tallest building laid on its side — will also have swimming pools, sky gardens, and dining facilities.
If all this sounds familiar, it should be. Raffles City Chongqing is what happens when someone one-ups Marina Bay Sands by taking the original concept wholesale and adding more parts to it. CapitaLand’s description about their development says nothing about the similarities to MBS, but noted that Safdie drew inspiration from Chongqing’s “thousand years of waterway transportation culture” to create “an image of powerful sails upon the river”.
To be fair, Safdie did design MBS after all, so he’s at liberty to replicate the same thing somewhere else. The construction is expected to be completed by the middle of 2018, and will open in phases next year.
