Before Zaha Hadid Architects were given this site in 2012, someone had already started building on it. The foundations of a condominium tower were in the ground at City of Dreams, Melco’s resort in Cotai, and the tower had never been finished. The architects kept them, took the rectangle of the old footprint and extruded … Read more
Henry Fok, the Hong Kong businessman who built the White Swan with the Guangdong government, insisted that its doors stay open to everyone when it opened on Shamian Island in February 1983. People came in T-shirts and sandals just to look. Guangzhou’s own account of those first months records crowds that got through more than … Read more
Wynn Palace opened at eight in the evening on 22 August 2016, Wynn’s first resort on Cotai, ten years after Wynn Macau on the peninsula. It had cost US$4.2 billion, taken six and a half years to design and come in months late, and it had 1,706 rooms, suites and villas in a tower of … Read more
The Chow Tai Fook Finance Centre stands 530 metres over Zhujiang New Town, the planned business district on the Pearl River in Tianhe, so the view from the hotel is of the new city. New World Development, the Cheng family’s property company, built it to a design by Kohn Pedersen Fox, which won the competition … Read more
Four Seasons Hotel Guangzhou occupies the top third of Guangzhou International Finance Center, a tower of 103 storeys and 440 metres that WilkinsonEyre won in a 2004 competition and that was built for Yuexiu Property Group between 2005 and 2010. The architects gave it a triangular plan and a diagrid structure, which they describe as … Read more
When GIC invested in Capital Place in October 2013, the hotel planned for the complex on Jalan Gatot Subroto was described as a St Regis, the first all-suite hotel in Jakarta, to be managed by Starwood. Its developer, Rajawali Property Group, also owned the city’s existing Four Seasons on Jalan Rasuna Said, which closed in … Read more
Bundaran HI, the roundabout at the head of Jalan Thamrin, takes its initials from the hotel that faces it. Sukarno had Hotel Indonesia built in about two years for the Asian Games of 1962, as Jakarta’s first hotel of international standard and a picture of the modern country he wanted visitors to see. It opened … Read more
Rosewood Bangkok rises 30 storeys on Ploenchit Road, and its silhouette answers a planning guideline as much as a gesture. Kohn Pedersen Fox, the New York architects, explain that the sloping form responds to Bangkok’s setback guidelines: as the tower climbs it steps back, which creates terraces and smaller floor plates. The same incline carries … Read more
The architect and developer Ciputra first saw a painting by Hendra Gunawan in 1962, at his aunt’s house; he began to collect the work and became the painter’s friend, and he promised him a museum. When his company built Ciputra World 1 in Kuningan, part of the business district Jakartans call the Golden Triangle, he … Read more
When Ben Taechaubol of Country Group Development first saw the 5.75-hectare plot on Charoenkrung Road in 2009, it was home to about thirty tenants, among them a fishery, and it took five years, he told The Peak, to relocate them equitably. “We knew straight away that something wonderful could be built there,” he said. What … Read more