Morpheus Hotel / Zaha Hadid Architects

Architects: Zaha Hadid Architects
Area: 147860 m²
Year: 2018
Photographs: Ivan Dupont, Virgile Simon Bertrand
Lighting Design: Isometrix
Traffic Engineer: MVA
Acoustic Consultant: Shen Milsom & Wilke
Quantity Surveyor: WT Partnership
Design: Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher
Client: Melco Resorts & Entertainment
Zha Project Directors: Viviana Muscettola, Michele Pasca di Magliano
Zha Facade Director: Paolo Matteuzzi
Zha Project Architects: Michele Salvi, Bianca Cheung, Maria Loreto Flores, Clara Martins
Zha Project Team: Miron Mutyaba, Milind Khade, Pierandrea Angius, Massimo Napoleoni, Stefano Iacopini, Davide Del Giudice, Luciano Letteriello, Luis Migue Samanez, Cyril Manyara, Alvin Triestanto, Muhammed Shameel, Goswin Rothenthal, Santiago Fernandez-Achury, Vahid Eshraghi, Melika Aljukic
Zha Interior Team: Daniel Fiser, Thomas Sonder, Daniel Coley, Yooyeon Noh, Jinqi Huang, Mirta Bilos, Alexander Kuroda, Gaganjit Singh, Marina Martinez, Shajay Bhooshan, Henry Louth, Filippo Nassetti, David Reeves, Marko Gligorov, Neil Ridgen, Milica Pihler- Mirjanic, Grace Chung, Mario Mattia, Mariagrazia Lanza
Zha Concept Team: Viviana Muscettola, Tiago Correia, Clara Martins, Maria Loreto Flores, Victor Orive, Danilo Arsic, Ines Fontoura, Fabiano Costinanza, Rafael Gonzalez, Muhammed Shameel
Executive Architect: Leigh & Orange, Hong Kong
Local Architect: CAA City Planning & Engineering Consultants, Macau
Structural Engineering: Buro Happold, London/Hong Kong
Facade Engineering: Buro Happold
Third-Party Reviewer: Rolf Jensen & Associates
Other Interior Designer: ¥ Remedios Studio, Hong Kong (Guestrooms, L01 VIP lobby, L03 Spa & Gym, L40 Pool deck and pool villas). Westar Architects International (L02 Gaming areas & Li Ying Restaurant, L42 Gaming Salons). Jouin Manku (L03 Alain Ducasse Restaurant). MC Design (L30 Executive Lounge). Leigh & Orange, Macau (BOH Areas).
Fire Engineering: Arup
Mechanical & Electrical Engineer: J. Roger Preston
City: Cotai

Morpheus Hotel, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, is a 40-story luxury hotel in City of Dreams, Cotai, Macau, inspired by traditional Chinese jade carving. The design features carved voids forming an urban window, linking interior communal spaces with the city. Integrated with the three-story City of Dreams podium, the hotel includes 770 guest rooms, sky villas, event spaces, gaming areas, restaurants, a spa, and a rooftop pool. Originally planned as a condominium, its existing foundations were repurposed to create a 160-meter-high monolithic structure, sculpted with three horizontal voids that enhance views and define the atrium’s interior. A central atrium spans the full height, with twelve glass elevators offering panoramic views. As the world’s first free-form high-rise exoskeleton, Morpheus eliminates internal supporting walls or columns, transitioning from a dense structural grid at the base to a lighter one at the top. ZHA project director Viviana Muscettola describes the hotel as a fusion of sculptural form and structural integrity, while Melco Resorts CEO Lawrence Ho calls it a contemporary masterpiece designed for future generations.

Macau, recognized as Asia’s leading entertainment destination, attracted over 32 million tourists in 2017, with visitor numbers rising annually. Situated in Cotai, Macau, the City of Dreams is a major integrated resort that features a casino, two theatres, a shopping district, 20 restaurants, and four hotels.

Inspired by the fluid forms of China’s jade carving traditions, the design of Morpheus integrates dramatic public spaces and spacious guest rooms with innovative engineering and a cohesive architectural form.

Designed as a vertical extrusion of its rectangular footprint, the building features carved voids at its center, forming an urban window that links the hotel’s interior communal spaces with the city while shaping the sculptural forms that define its public areas.

Connected at ground level to the three-story podium of the City of Dreams resort, Morpheus accommodates 770 guest rooms, suites, and sky villas. The hotel also features civic spaces, meeting and event facilities, gaming rooms, a lobby atrium, restaurants, a spa, and a rooftop pool, along with extensive back-of-house areas and ancillary facilities.

The design integrates the hotel’s complex programs within a single cohesive structure. Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) was commissioned to design the hotel in 2012, utilizing existing foundations originally intended for a condominium tower that was never completed.

Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) designed Morpheus as a direct extrusion of the existing abandoned foundations, using the rectangular footprint to shape a 40-story structure. The building features two internal vertical circulation cores, linked at the podium and roof levels, where key guest amenities are located.

This extrusion created a monolithic block, maximizing its development envelope within the 160-meter height restriction set by local planning regulations. The block was then sculpted with voids, shaping its distinctive architectural form.

The hotel’s design is structured as two towers connected at the ground and roof levels. Between them, a central atrium extends the full height of the building, intersected by external voids that link the north and south facades. These voids form an urban window, visually connecting the hotel’s interior communal spaces with the city.

Three horizontal vortices shape the voids within the building, defining the hotel’s distinctive internal public spaces and creating unique corner suites with expansive views of both the atrium and the city. This configuration maximizes external views for guest rooms while ensuring a balanced distribution of accommodations on both sides of the building.

Between the free-form voids that cut through the atrium, a series of bridges accommodate the hotel’s restaurants, bars, and guest lounges, featuring renowned chefs such as Alain Ducasse and Pierre Hermé. The atrium’s twelve glass elevators offer guests panoramic views of both the hotel’s interior and exterior as they move through the building’s voids.

As a world-class hotel, Morpheus required highly adaptable interior spaces to meet the diverse needs of its guest amenities. Its exoskeleton structure enhances interior flexibility by eliminating the need for supporting walls or columns. As the world’s first free-form high-rise exoskeleton, its structural framework transitions from a dense pattern at the lower levels to a lighter, more open grid at the top.

Morpheus reflects Zaha Hadid Architects’ (ZHA) four decades of research into the integration of interior and exterior, civic and private, solid and void, Cartesian and Einsteinian principles. The design interweaves space and structure, unifying diverse programs while fostering continuous spatial connections. Viviana Muscettola, ZHA’s project director, describes the hotel as a fusion of optimal spatial arrangement, structural integrity, and sculptural form, emphasizing that its design is intriguing because it does not reference traditional architectural typologies.

Musçettola explains that while Macau’s architecture has traditionally drawn inspiration from global styles, Morpheus emerges as a design shaped by its unique environment and site conditions, representing an architecture distinctly rooted in the city. She further highlights that the expertise of the entire Morpheus team has expanded architectural possibilities, with a comprehensive parametric model integrating the hotel’s aesthetic, structural, and fabrication requirements, paving the way for a new approach to planning and construction in the built environment.

Lawrence Ho, chairman and CEO of Melco Resorts, stated that from the outset, the company aligned with Zaha Hadid Architects’ vision and drive to push boundaries. He described Morpheus as a journey of the imagination, emphasizing that its curved exterior and dramatic interior spaces create a visually and sensorially engaging experience, making it a contemporary masterpiece designed for future generations to enjoy.