Singapore’s Green Architecture: the back story

About Singapore’s Green Architecture: the back story

By the ULTIMATE Singapore Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Singapore’s newest buildings do something few skylines attempt: they carry the tropics up with them. Gardens spiral through office towers, creepers climb hotel façades, and terraces of trees hang high above the street. Here is the story behind the city’s green architecture, where to see it, and how it sits beside the art.

A garden halfway up

Walk along Market Street in the Central Business District and look up at CapitaSpring. From a distance it reads as a sleek 280-metre tower of fine aluminium fins, but about a third of the way up the stripes part to reveal a forest. Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group in collaboration with Carlo Ratti Associati, with RSP as project architect, the tower was completed in November 2021, and it remains one of the tallest buildings in Singapore.

That forest is the Green Oasis, four connected levels from the 17th to the 20th floor, laced with 312 metres of spiralling walkways and planted with more than 38,000 plants of over 70 species, among them more than 160 trees. It is open to the air, so breezes and sunlight reach the plants, and it was planned for the public as well as for the offices above. At the top, the Sky Garden on level 51 holds what CapitaLand describes as Singapore’s tallest publicly accessible observatory deck, beside an urban farm of almost 5,000 square feet that supplies the building’s restaurants.

In Singapore the gardens no longer stop at street level: they climb the towers, spiral through the offices and finish with a farm on the roof.

The tower keeps faith with the street, too. At its foot an 18-metre-high City Room opens onto a new public park made from part of the old Market Street, and the Market Street Hawker Centre was rehoused on the second and third floors, with 56 stalls. Access to the gardens can change, so check CapitaSpring’s own information before you plan a visit to the top.

Towers that grow

The Singapore practice WOHA has done more than any other to make green towers part of the city. In Tanjong Pagar, Oasia Hotel Downtown rises 27 storeys from Peck Seah Street, wrapped in a permeable red aluminium mesh on which 21 species of creepers have been planted according to sun and shade; with the trees and shrubs on its terraces, the building holds more than 50 species in all. Sky terraces on the 6th, 12th and 21st floors and on the roof act as extra ground levels in the air. The hotel opened in April 2016 and was recognised in the President’s Design Award in 2018. Over the years the green has grown across the red, so the tower looks different every time you pass.

A little further north, PARKROYAL COLLECTION Pickering, also by WOHA, opened in January 2013 beside Hong Lim Park. Its curving, contoured sky gardens seem to continue the park up the building, and the hotel describes more than 15,000 square metres of gardens, waterfalls and planter walls: more than twice the area of the land it stands on. See it from the park in the early morning, when the terraces catch the first light.

Gardens indoors

At Changi, the idea goes indoors. Jewel Changi Airport, designed by Moshe Safdie, encloses a garden under a dome of glass and steel, and at its centre the Rain Vortex falls 40 metres through an opening in the roof, the world’s tallest indoor waterfall, framed by the terraces of the Shiseido Forest Valley. Give it an hour on your way in or out of the city.

Art among the green

Singapore’s great art buildings share the same instinct for light and shade. At National Gallery Singapore, studioMilou and CPG Consultants joined the former Supreme Court and City Hall beneath a canopy carried on tree-like columns; in the Padang Atrium a filigree roof, drawn from the weaving of rattan, filters daylight the way a forest canopy does. Climb to the Ng Teng Fong Roof Garden for the view across the Padang.

Nearby in Tanjong Pagar, the Singapore Art Museum has made its home since January 2022 in an industrial warehouse at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, by the port. And on a green hillside to the south-west, Gillman Barracks sets contemporary galleries in the low blocks of a former military barracks dating from 1936, among them ShanghART, Sundaram Tagore, Ota Fine Arts, Mizuma, Yavuz and Richard Koh Fine Art. Opening hours vary from gallery to gallery, so check before you go.

The design and art calendar

January is the art season. Singapore Art Week holds its 15th edition from 21 to 31 January 2027, and at its heart ART SG returns to Marina Bay Sands from 22 to 24 January 2027. Then design takes over: the first Singapore Design Biennale, which succeeds Singapore Design Week, is planned from 14 May to 20 June 2027 by the DesignSingapore Council.

Hong Kong, a few hours’ flight away, makes the perfect contrast: there, banks, galleries and auction houses stack themselves into towers of glass and steel on steep and scarce land. Our guide to Hong Kong architecture and design tells that story.

Our advice

Start at Hong Lim Park early in the morning for PARKROYAL COLLECTION Pickering, walk on to Oasia Hotel Downtown in Tanjong Pagar, and lunch at the Market Street Hawker Centre inside CapitaSpring before you look for the Green Oasis. Save the National Gallery for the heat of the afternoon, and keep Jewel for your last hours before the flight home.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with Singapore’s Green Architecture: the back story before you go.