MGM Cotai’s exterior façade nears completion

Hunter Clayton

MGM Cotai’s construction is at a new stage as the exterior façade approaches final completion. Hunter Clayton, executive vice president of MGM Resorts Development, reveals that the podium façade cladding will be completed “within the next several weeks.”

Clayton joined MGM Resorts in 2011 where he had been responsible for all aspects of design and construction management for gaming resort projects, including MGM National Harbor, Maryland and MGM Springfield (both in the U.S.) and MGM Cotai.

In an exclusive interview with the Times, he gave the final update on this stage of construction: “We’ve wrapped up the remaining enclosures, all the lighting of the mullions, so we are 100 percent complete enclosing all the boxes. We have been working on this with our cladding contractor, easily over the past eighteen months, and it has been a very long and kind of meticulous process because of the way that the panels are articulated. Basically every single glass module has a triangular protruding mullion that has an integrated LED light built within it,” the executive said. 

“Not only are we installing the glass on the structure, but we are having to install the LED fixtures and all the electrical and the data wires back into the building, so that the entire façade can be lit.”

One of the special features of the façade will be the lighting system, characterized by Clayton as different from most: “We developed it so that the integrated lights within the fin don’t shine outward. They actually shine inward to the mullion face itself, so when you look at the building from outside it’s an indirect light or a glow from the LED onto the face of the mullion, so it gives a much softer and elegant feel to it.” 

With the exterior of the building, also advancing quickly, the remaining work to complete the integrated resort  is mainly inside the building. “It’s final finish, installation, furniture, materials on the walls, stone on the floors and so forth,” the company’s executive vice president said.

Asked to describe the main architectonic features of the integrated resort, Clayton said that MGM Cotai “is a combination of interior and exterior intricate detailing.”

The exterior façade of the building

“In the works that I have done around the world within MGM, our approach is always to develop architecture that is not necessarily themed, but is iconic architecture that complements its community. Within Macau it’s such a diverse palate of architecture and such a different mix of hospitality-integrated resort type of product that MGM needed to deliver something that really was unique. Obviously we have a sister property within Macau, so we gained inspiration from this architecture [MGM Macau, where the interview took place], but MGM Cotai really wanted to celebrate a uniqueness of its own and stand out amongst its neighbors,” he describes.

Hunter Clayton views MGM Macau and MGM Cotai as “properties within the same family,” given a similar color scheme and other aspects. But the new integrated resort will be “much larger” and different. “We think that the product that we are offering there in terms of the interior design (the detailing of it), the jewel box concept that you get from the exterior… There are a number of different special events or experiences that you will interact [with] throughout the interior of the building.”

The Spectacle roof exterior

One of those experiences will be The Spectacle, which MGM describes in a press release issued yesterday as a “a meticulously engineered column-free long-span diagrid structure as long as a soccer field, where the form of the roof has peaks and valleys that allow it to support its own weight.” During a conversation with the Times this week, Clayton praised the construction process of the digitally-engineered structure: “Once we created all the nodes and connected it around its perimeter beam, we then slowly took away all the secondary supports and it settled into place. The movement on that structure once we took all the supports away, was less than three millimeters. So it’s a very precise, very strong self-supporting structure. Every load within the structure is actually carried by itself. […] From an engineering and construction viewpoint, it is quite unique.” The result of this engineering feat, designed to extend over the nearby restaurants and retail outlets, will be “a ceiling structure that forms a subtle wave in the sky,” according to MGM’s press release.

MGM Cotai is a property owned by MGM China Holdings Ltd, a venture between Pansy Ho and MGM Resorts International. MGM China announced earlier that the resort will open during the second quarter of 2017.

The Spectacle roof interior

Instrumental contractor

The executive vice president of MGM Resorts Development praises the work of the project’s general contractor, China State Construction. “They have been very instrumental at helping us deliver the project. […] Their subsidiary, China Steel, did all the structural steel, the podium steel and The Spectacle roof itself. They are still our partners today. We walk every single day on the site between our team and theirs, and they are one of the cornerstones of our team to deliver the project,” Clayton told the Times.

Standing out on the skyline

“From the outset we wanted to design a structure that would really stand out on the skyline,” said John Bushell, design principal at Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), the New York and London based firm appointed for MGM Cotai. “The outside is striking both in daylight and at night, with lots of dramatic spatial experiences within. The two different hotels and an exclusive Mansion all form part of a single distinctive unified composition,” he added, as cited in a press release by MGM.