Marina Bay
The Marina Bay area is a modern symbol of Singapore, built at the start of the C21st on land reclaimed from the sea. The architecture is astounding and stunning, yet still conceived on a human scale. It has impressed so many people that photographs of Marina Bay are seen all over the world by millions of people, and probably in billions of screen-views.
If you take a walk along the embankment of Merlion Park, it's impossible not to be impressed at the neat and subtle way that colonial-era Fullerton Hotel has been worked into the landscape, along with the statue of the mythical Merlion – a fantastical figure with the head of a lion and body of a fish, whose statue was cast in 1972. On Sentosa Island visitors can see another copy of this statue, standing 37 metres high.
The best time to admire the waterfront and Merlion statues is at sundown.
The building of the Art & Science Museum is shaped like a lotus. Rainwater collects in the centre like a cup, and is used in the building.
Lau Pa Sat
Lau Pa Sat was built in the C19th and is better known at Telok Ayer Old Market. The British architect George Colman built the market at the waterside of the Gulf of Telok, in 1838. The building is based around an octagonal design, with high-rise points at each corner of its metal structure. Yet when we take a look at the stone building with its columns we see today, put up in 1973 as a national monument, it's hard to imagine that its basis is a metal structure dating back to the Victorian era.
