Morpheus at Macau’s City of Dreams makes structure part of its identity. The external lattice is visible before a visitor reaches the hotel, but the most useful way to read it is as a system carrying loads and making space. The three large voids through the tower are part of that engineering problem.
The Institution of Structural Engineers’ project record describes a 160-metre building whose accommodation is arranged around a core in each wing. The exoskeleton works with those two concrete cores to provide the principal vertical and horizontal load-bearing elements. It credits Buro Happold Engineering as structural designer and Zaha Hadid Architects as architect.
This matters when interpreting photographs. The lattice is not simply an ornamental layer applied to an ordinary tower. Its relationship with the cores is fundamental to the building, even though the cores are less conspicuous in an exterior view. The dramatic openings and the spaces around them depend on that larger arrangement.
Bouygues Construction’s account adds a revealing number: 4,500 tonnes of steel were needed for temporary works. Dragages Macau delivered the structure and facade, and the builder describes complex sequences of removing temporary supports to stabilise the exoskeleton. The finished silhouette therefore conceals an earlier, substantial support system.
The contractor also identifies building-information modelling as a link between geometry, prefabrication and site execution. For a structure with changing shapes, coordination has to extend beyond drawing the outline. Components must be made, positioned and assembled in a viable order.
The project received the Institution’s 2019 Construction Innovation award. Its judges emphasised the digital and communication skills connecting design, bespoke manufacture and erection. Read through that evidence, Morpheus becomes a story about the process that makes unusual space possible, as well as the appearance of the completed hotel.
Explore the casino directory for more property context.
Leave a Reply