ARI Working Paper Series

This paper interrogates the relationships between architectural representation, spatial production and state power in the context of the making of Marina Bay Sands. I critically analyze and unpack the micro-politics of the planning and competition process around 2005 that transformed the Las Vegas casino-resort into the “Integrated Resort” at Singapore’s Marina Bay. My analysis reveals how the “Integrated Resort” – as discourse, image and building – was not merely discovered elsewhere and imported into Singapore. Rather, it had to be manufactured through a hidden process of negotiations, contestations and misrepresentations. I argue that this process should be seen as an “art of blending” – by hiding the casino and blending into the aesthetic order of Marina Bay, the architectural design of Marina Bay Sands was an attempt to resolve the crisis of representation produced by locating the controversial casino on this prominent site. Rather than interpreting the art of blending simply as a mystification of structural political economic forces, I show that this process was fraught with unlikely alliances and inexplicable contingencies such that it cannot be reduced to a single ideology or economic model. Architects, planners, bureaucrats and developers found themselves in shifting and differential power-relations mediated by the administrative procedures of the competition. Though the success of Marina Bay Sands lay on how well the crisis of representation was ultimately resolved, a constructivist critique provides a way to unravel what appears to be coherent representations of the state as a monolithic and univocal entity and its sponsored narratives of nationalist modernity.