Marina Bay

Marina Bay is Singapore’s statement to the world, and the statement is: we do not do things by halves. The Marina Bay Sands hotel — three towers supporting a sky park and infinity pool 57 storeys above the bay — dominates the skyline with an audacity that somehow works. I have seen ambitious architecture in Dubai, in Shanghai, in the glass towers of Mexico City’s Reforma, but Marina Bay Sands occupies a category of its own: a building that should be absurd but instead feels inevitable, as though the skyline had been waiting for it.

The ArtScience Museum blooms beside it like a lotus flower made of mathematics. We visited the permanent exhibition on digital art and spent two hours in rooms where light and water and projection merged into something I could not categorize — not quite a museum, not quite a performance, something in between that left me standing in a dark room watching koi swim across the ceiling and feeling, briefly, like the future might be beautiful after all.

We walked the bay at dusk, that golden hour when the buildings light up in sequence and the water becomes a mirror of every colour the skyline can produce. The Helix Bridge spirals across the bay in a double helix of steel and light — a pedestrian bridge that could pass for a sculpture in any contemporary museum. The Esplanade — Theatres on the Bay, with its spiky durian-inspired roof — hosts world-class performances nightly, but the architecture alone is worth the visit. I stood outside for ten minutes just looking at the texture of the aluminium sunshades. They are designed to regulate heat gain. They look like the skin of something alive.

The Spectra light and water show runs nightly from the waterfront promenade, and it is free, and it is the kind of thing that in any other city would feel like an afterthought but here feels like a promise. The Merlion statue presides over all of it with an expression of serene indifference, water pouring from its mouth into the bay as though the entire spectacle were something it had seen before and found acceptable.

By day, the bay is a place of jogging paths and museum visits. We explored the Red Dot Design Museum and ate at Satay by the Bay, a hawker-style food court in the Gardens by the Bay precinct where the satay is grilled over charcoal and the view includes supertrees. By night, the waterfront transforms into something that feels like a science fiction film directed by someone with impeccable taste. I kept thinking of how this whole bay was reclaimed land — pulled from the sea and turned into the most photogenic square mile in Southeast Asia. Singapore does not accept the geography it was given. It makes new geography and puts an infinity pool on top.

When to go: Year-round — Singapore’s equatorial climate is consistent. December to January brings light festivals. The Spectra show runs nightly at 8pm and 9pm and is free. Book Marina Bay Sands’ CÉ LA VI rooftop bar for sunset views — arrive thirty minutes early, because everyone else has the same idea.