In Chongqing, at Chaotianmen, at the Jiefangbei peninsula where the Yangtze and Jialing rivers come together, the complex designed by architect Moshe Safdie will be build. It is “an almost literal copy of their Marina Sands Bay scheme in Singapore”, according to Daan Roggeveen, a Dutch architect quoted by Bert van Dijk, see here.
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| Overall impression in Singapore will be completely different from the one in Chongqing Photo: Danny Friedmann |
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| Here you see the “card” like supports of the platform in Singapore. Photo: Danny Friedmann |
I do not concur, because it does not do justice to the creative work of Mr Safdie. I have been to the Marina Sands Bay in Singapore and you can see that Mr Safdie was inspired by a deck of cards, see here. The towers that support the platform are like three inverted V shaped cards. Mr Safdie makes clear that for the Chongqing Chaotianmen complex he was inspired by the sails of a ship. And the towers indeed look like curved sails, all to one side.
Mr Safdie is certainly not a lazy architect copying his own work (self-plagiarizing) as alleged by Maurits Elen in Shanghaiist here. Yes, both designs have a platform on top of the towers. Mr Safdie is the one who made that building structure famous and it seems to have become his “trademark”. But nobody would say to an architect that is doing another tower, but in a different style, that he is copying himself because he is doing another tower.