Iconic: Marina Bay Sands’ SkyPark and its infinity pool offer views over Singapore’s Central Business District. But beyond those juxtapositions, there are others. Safdie discussed a Singapore program that offers incentives to developers if they incorporate original art into public spaces.

“It was the opportunity to have something unique … We selected seven of eight sites where there was a real opportunity to make art and architecture into one integrated idea. The idea was not to have
sculpture and painting placed in the project but to actually work so hard that it became part of the architecture. Not unlike Gothic architecture with a stained glass window, or the statues on top of the buttresses are part of the architecture and vice versa,” he said.

This integration of art and architecture is also evident at the ArtScience Museum at the foot of the vast complex of hotel rooms, restaurants, shops and a casino that is Marina Bay Sands. Constructed to resemble a lotus, and with lotuses bursting from the ponds surrounding the building, the space within features an open-air courtyard of flowing water that simulates rain.

The museum is currently showing “Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal” on its first stop of an Asian tour, the extremely comprehensive exhibit of over 260 of the artist’s works, a masterfully organized experience of the art of a modern-day icon.

Visitors can peer at childhood photos; the simple ink lines of a Truman Capote portrait from 1952; the iconic Campbell’s tomato juice series from 1968; a recreated Factory complete with red couch and the music of such Warhol-associated bands as the Velvet Underground; the troubling blurred silkscreen capturing one man’s suicide from 1963; or a photograph of Sylvester Stallone in 1977 looking chiseled, tan and bored.

The exhibit’s curator, Lise MacDonald, said, “It’s not the first exhibit of Andy Warhol in Asia. There have been several: in Tokyo, in Seoul, small exhibitions in Singapore as well. But it’s the first time that the Pittsburgh [Andy Warhol] Museum showcases the biggest collection of Warhol in the world — such a large amount of artworks of Andy Warhol — in Asia. And it’s the first time in Singapore that there are so many artworks of Andy Warhol gathered into one venue.”

Warhol liked nothing if not capturing icons in photographs or prints, constantly making statements about the ubiquity of images by reproducing them.

How appropriate then for Marina Bay Sands to host this exhibit, for one does not need only to gaze at Warhol’s art but to take a walk outside and look up.

Modern nature: One iLight 2012 installation titled 5QU1D proffered a hybrid creature that glowed sometimes blue, sometimes pink, sometimes a tie-dyed mix of colors.“[Warhol] used to say that the Empire State [Building] is a star … He spent a whole night filming the Empire State and then extended the movie to 8 hours long. So the first time that he presented that movie he was just astonished to see that people would sit down for 8 hours and watch just the Empire State with the light changing over it. It’s more a landscape — a moving landscape artwork — of the life of the Empire State through a night and also the message for us to look at what’s surrounding us and to consider as very interesting and beautiful and not just pass either through people or through the Empire State without at least recognizing the beauty in them,” MacDonald said of Warhol’s film about New York’s iconic tower.

As day moves into night in Singapore, people can be seen strolling and jogging along the wide promenade that hugs the water as lights flicker and move over Marina Bay. The sunsets can be marvelous, especially when combined with the iLight 2012 exhibit that recently illuminated the area.

After Light by Storybox featured multiple screens embedded in shipping containers, those containers displaying black and white images of human faces combined with the sounds of life in Singapore and New Zealand. The installation was set dramatically away from the sidewalk and framed by the towers of Marina Bay Sands, which just happened during one perfect moment to be expelling colored beams of light onto the artwork in an eclectic evening show called Wonder Full.

“I think anything that’s not useful is not really beautiful,” Safdie said of architecture. Beautiful the place obviously is as rays of light alter and brighten the darkness, or as the sun radiates over the asymmetrical SkyPark; useful it is as well as one meanders its bayside paths or eats and drinks at one of the many restaurants.

With buildings looming gloriously over a bay created in what was once an open harbor and offering vistas from both high and low, one realizes that the many juxtapositions Marina Bay calls forth are to be savored. Glory in the assertive modernism — in the human feats of engineering that now define a cityscape — stand between earth and sky, land and sea, light and dark. This place is useful and beautiful, and, like Warhol’s film of the Empire State Building, it lets light in.

Striking: Designed by architect Moshe Safdie, Marina Bay Sands incorporates a vast swath connecting the peaks of the site’s hotel towers.
Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal until August 12
ArtScience Museum
Marina Bay Sands
Singapore

— Photos by JP/Deanna Ramsay