Resorts World Sentosa is an integrated leisure and entertainment resort of the largest kind, a 49-hectare tropical destination for regional and international visitors sited on Singapore’s Sentosa Island. The architectural and master-planning project is designed to offer a milieu of activities among a series of heavily interwoven zones of programme. DPA worked across all scales to design a resort unified with its tropical island site and responsive to its views of the ocean and the city of Singapore.

Three tropical design elements, thus, characterise the project: (1) water, (2) landscape and (3) the forms, materials and details associated with tropical architecture — highly articulated façades, awning treatments, shade-producing trellis work and large pitched roofs. Central to the project’s planning is a system of waterways and pedestrian circulation routes, designed to bring visitors on visually evolving journeys, through event spaces and across changing topographies. These paths are planned sequentially to alternate the visitor amongst various axes of orientation and reveal new and exciting frames of view, such as the mainland, the sea, the elements of the project’s architecture, or the Merlion national landmark on the site’s ridge.

Resorts World Sentosa jointly exhibits large open spaces: performance venues, a retail promenade, an outdoor food and beverage zone covered by an immense ETFE canopy for shade and rain protection, and the intimate, immediate relationships of the waterfront and lush landscape. The use of natural palettes supply a breadth of warm colour and surface that engage the visitor and assimilate the project within the island’s tropical rainforests.