Saturday 6 June 2020

wonkavator

Though still under construction, the spectacular “horizontal skyscraper” of Chonqing’s Raffles City project in the central Yuzhong district is welcoming visitors—like its namesake development in Singapore, called in honour of Sir Stamford Raffles (*1781 – †1826), Lieutenant-Governor of the East India Company and founder of the modern city state and British Malay.
The skybridge, the Crystal, is three hundred metres long and is supported by four towers at a height of a quarter of a kilometre and features a park, a history and industrial museum of the city, and an observation platform with future plans for a lounge, restaurants, bars and an infinity pool. Within the glass and steel columns, there are spaces allotted for offices, hotels, shopping centres as well as fourteen hundred residential units.