About nilvado, and who writes it

Where this came from

I am Deborah Aspinall. For fourteen years I worked at a structural practice off Arundel Gate in Sheffield, mostly on transfer structures. That is the branch of the job concerned with carrying a building when the columns underneath it have run out: flats over a supermarket, a hospital wing over an ambulance route, an office floor plate over a Victorian retaining wall nobody is allowed to touch. It is unfashionable work and it teaches you to look up in car parks, permanently.

In November 2016 I was in Singapore for a conference on long-span floor systems and did the tourist thing on the free afternoon. I went up Marina Bay Sands. And I spent most of it standing at the north end of the SkyPark reading the soffit, because there is a stretch of that deck with nothing underneath it, and I wanted to know what was holding it.

Then I went looking for something to read about it and found nothing. Thousands of words about the pool. Nothing about the legs. Every article treated the most interesting engineering decision in the building as a backdrop for a photograph. That gap is the whole reason this exists.

The first issue went out in March 2019, photocopied, to about forty people, most of them former colleagues who were obliged to be polite about it. It is a website now. The method has not changed.

What we will not do

We do not take money from resorts. Not advertising, not sponsorship, not press trips, not free rooms, not affiliate commission.
We do not book anything. There is no booking form here and there will not be one.
We do not link to online casinos, bookmakers or gambling operators of any kind. The only outbound links on a sheet go to the resort's own website and to help resources.
We do not tell you to gamble, or how. There is no strategy content here, no odds, no systems, and there never will be.
We do not invent numbers. If an operator does not publish something, the sheet says so and leaves the gap visible.

The honest bit

I have not been to every building in this issue. I have stood in Marina Bay Sands, Resorts World Sentosa and Solaire. I have not been inside Paradise City, and sheet 05 is read from published drawings, the architect's project material and the operator's own descriptions rather than from a visit. That is a real limitation and it is stated on the sheet itself, not buried here.

It also means I cannot tell you what the carpet smells like or whether the lifts are slow. Other guides can. That is a fair trade for the thing we do instead.

Corrections

We get things wrong. When we do, the correction goes on the sheet in question, not into an archive nobody reads, and the compiled date at the foot of the page changes. If you have found an error, particularly if you work at one of these properties and can point at a published source, please write to [email protected]. We reply within five working days.

The redlines section on the front page is the running list of things the rest of the internet keeps getting wrong. It is the most useful thing here, and it is mostly other people's mistakes rather than ours, which is the only reason it is on the front page.

Photographs

None of the photographs on this site are ours. Every one is used under a Creative Commons licence and credited beside the image with the photographer's name and the specific licence. If you are one of those photographers and the credit is wrong, tell us and it will be fixed the same week.