ArtScience Museum

This guide to the ArtScience Museum in Singapore traces how Las Vegas Sands chairman Sheldon Adelson and architect Moshe Safdie set out to give the country a single welcoming gesture at the edge of Marina Bay, and the two very different ways people read the shape that resulted. It follows the building's rainwater engineering, funneled down through a central oculus into the atrium below, and lands on the choice of exhibition that opened the museum in February 2011: a shipwreck's cargo of Tang dynasty treasures pulled from the Java Sea.