Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Chua Beng Huat, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

When the competitive tender was launched in 2007 for the casino license at Marina Bay, Singapore, only four developers submitted their bids. Steve Wynn had withdrawn after what he thought was excessive interference by Singaporean planners on his architectural design. Sheldon Adelson of Las Vegas Sands replaced his architect, Paul Steelman who specializes in casino design, with Moshe Safdie, known ironically for designing social housing and cultural institutions. Though Las Vegas Sands eventually won and built Marina Bay Sands, it looked nothing like a typical Las Vegas Sands project, both in its external form and overall spatial organization. In official parlance, it is an Integrated Resort, not a casino.

This paper interrogates the relationships between cultural representation, spatial production and state power in the context of the making of Marina Bay Sands. By unpacking the micro-politics of the competition that transformed the Las Vegas casino-resort into the “Integrated Resort” at Singapore’s Marina Bay, I show how the “Integrated Resort” 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, Marina Bay Sands expresses a paradoxical effort to surpass nationalist history while reproducing its moral anxieties.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Lee Kah Wee is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. His doctoral dissertation, “Las Vegas in Singapore”, submitted in 2012 at University of California, Berkeley, examines how the casino development in Singapore articulates the contradictions of nationalist modernity – it projects a city of progress, one that participates fully in the global diffusion of spectacular monuments of high finance and culture and yet, in its shadows lurks a city of violence where the criminalizing zeal of nation-building is hidden. His work on the politics of urban planning and casino development has been published in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Environment and Planning A and C, and the University of Las Vegas Center for Gaming Research.

REGISTRATION

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