Morpheus
Zaha Hadid's office inherited a rectangle of abandoned foundations and a 160-metre limit at City of Dreams, then carved it open and put the structure on the outside.
- Neighbourhood
- City of Dreams, Cotai
- Status
- Open
- Design
- Zaha Hadid Architects; guest rooms by Remedios Studio
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 it upwards to the 160-metre limit set by Macau's planning rules. So the outline of the hotel was settled before its design began: a straight-sided block of 40 storeys, thought of as two towers joined at the ground and at the roof.
Opened from the inside
Then the architects cut holes in it. Three horizontal voids pass right through the block, joining the north and south faces and opening the central atrium, which rises the full height of the building, to the city outside. Bridges across the voids carry restaurants, bars and lounges, among them Alain Ducasse at Morpheus, and twelve glass lifts run up through the atrium between them.
The structure sits on the outside. A steel exoskeleton, which the practice calls the world's first free-form exoskeleton on a high-rise, wraps the block, dense at the bottom where the loads are heaviest and opening into a lighter grid towards the top, and because it carries the building the floors inside need no supporting walls or columns. At the opening, the hotel said the steel amounted to more than four times the wrought iron in the Eiffel Tower.
The hotel opened on 15 June 2018, two years after Hadid's death, with about 770 rooms, suites and villas, the smallest of them 58 square metres, and a pool on the 40th floor, 130 metres above the ground.
OKYTO sets it among its neighbours in Cotai's hotels as architecture, with Wynn Palace among them. Its own references were local. The outer form was presented as drawing on carved jade, and the central voids on the figure eight, the luckiest number in Chinese, on a tower that stands above a casino.
Sources: Zaha Hadid Architects; Yam News; Structurae; City of Dreams Macau
Location
- Website
- Official website
