Khan Shatyr is the western anchor of the central axis: a vast translucent tent rising 150 metres on its three steel masts, designed by Foster + Partners and opened in 2010. It functions as a shopping mall and indoor entertainment centre — cinemas, restaurants, a small water park with a Maldivian-sand beach, mini-golf, and a tropical garden — engineered to maintain a comfortable temperature year-round in a city where winter regularly hits minus 30.
The architecture is the main reason to visit. The ETFE plastic skin glows from inside at dusk and changes colour at night; the central atrium has a sense of dramatic vertical space that the shops themselves cannot match. The beach area on the top floor is open to paying day-guests and is genuinely odd — palm trees, surf, and lifeguards in the middle of the steppe. Even if you skip the rides, walking through the building gives a measure of the scale of ambition behind New Astana.