MGM Cotai Opens in Macau as a Stack of Jewellery Boxes

MGM Cotai opened on 13 February 2018, a few days before Chinese New Year. It is MGM’s second resort in Macau, after the property on the peninsula, and it has about 1,400 rooms and suites. Its architecture, by the New York firm Kohn Pedersen Fox, set it apart from the themed resorts around it on the Cotai Strip.

Stacked boxes

The building is composed of eight rectangular volumes, stacked and shifted so that some project beyond those below. They are clad in glass of three metallic tones, gold, silver and bronze, and KPF’s design principal, John Bushell, described the composition as a set of Chinese jewellery boxes. The gaps and overhangs between the boxes break up what would otherwise be a very large slab, and the two hotel towers inside read as one object.

Where its neighbours borrow from Venice, Paris or the Las Vegas of the 1990s, MGM Cotai has no theme. It was the first resort in Macau to present itself through contemporary architecture, four months before Zaha Hadid’s Morpheus opened a short walk away.

The Spectacle

At the centre of the podium is the Spectacle, an atrium of 96,000 square feet, close to 9,000 square metres, under a glass roof. The roof is a diagrid of steel and glass with no columns, and it was recognised at opening as the largest free-span gridshell glazed roof in the world. Beneath it are gardens with thousands of live plants, terraces with restaurants and a ring of LED screens showing commissioned digital art. Unlike most public spaces in Macau’s resorts, it receives daylight.

Theatre and art

The MGM Theater seats 2,000 and has a 900-square-metre LED screen. Its seating is mounted on movable platforms and can be rearranged in more than ten configurations, from concert hall to fashion runway.

The resort opened with a collection of some 300 works of art, with an emphasis on contemporary Chinese artists and on a group of imperial carpets from the Qing dynasty, displayed in the public areas. The restaurants at opening included projects by chefs Mauro Colagreco, Mitsuharu Tsumura and Graham Elliot.

For the visitor

The Spectacle is open to all and is worth a visit for the roof alone. The rooms are contemporary and less ornate than is usual in Macau.