Khan Shatyry

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Khan Shatyry ("Royal Marquee") is a giant transparent tent currently under construction in Astana, capital city of Kazakhstan. The architectural project was unveiled by the President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev on 9 December 2006.

The 150m-high (500ft) tent has a 200m elliptical base covering 100,000 square meters.^[1] Underneath the tent, an area larger than 10 football stadiums, will be an urban-scale internal park, shopping and entertainment venue with squares and cobbled streets, a boating river, shopping centre, minigolf and indoor beach resort. It is being made from ETFE suspended on a network of cables strung from a central spire. The transparent material allows sunlight through which, in conjunction with air heating and cooling systems maintain an internal temperature between 15-30°C in the main space and 19-24°C in the retail units, while outside the temperature varies between -35 to +35°C across the year.

After the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation (2006), this will be the second project designed by UK architect Norman Foster (of Foster and Partners, collaborating architects are Linea, Gultekin and UMO^[1]), who has recently built a giant glass pyramid in Astana. The construction of the tent-city, expected to take a year(probably a bit more), will be carried out by the Turkish company Sembol.