18_Tiger palace Casinos Resort and Theater, Kathmandu

While this project merges community driven design & outreach, real estate development and architecture, it does so in focusing on sustainability and the creation of equity through the built environment. The Tiger Palace Casinos & Theater is a large-scale urban development attempting to expand the relationship between architecture and the city, the rural, and its human and climatic contexts. The project is designed with the careful balancing of land-leases, boundaries & borders and projected site-lines, always seeking ways to expand and reach out – into the city and to its neighboring communities, through the ground and onto its edges – looking and investigating its transitions, movements and connections, on both, a detail and urban scale.

As the middle-class quickly emerges in Nepal, as well as neighbouring India and China, Kathmandu is emerging as a center for commerce, culture, and entertainment. The project is a two-part masterplan for both an extension of the already popular Tiger Palace Casinos Resort in Bhairahawa and a proposal for a brand new eco-resort in Jhapa under the same brand, which aims to boost eco-commerce, culture, and entertainment in both regions of Nepal. The Bhairahawa extension, a proposal which is comprised of three circular volumes, each is dedicated to spirituality (temple), culture (amphitheater and performance space), and commerce (co-working, a makerspace and a youth hostel), that are held together with connecting geometric landscapes. With its new programs, the existing Tiger Palace Casino Resort becomes not only a magnet for entertainment, but also for commerce and cultural outreach.
The Tiger Palace Casinos Resort proposal in Jhapa is situated on a hillside, and its resort sprawls naturally across its landscape, featuring an underground-casino, hotel, restaurants, shopping mall, spa, and several outdoor event venues, as well as a water arcade that takes the shape of the iconic flower in a planned collaboration with the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami.