Jungle feeling at the airport

Changi Airport in Singapore is one of the largest airports in Asia. Now you can sweeten your stopover time there in a very special way, because the airport has been extended with a mega mall, multi-storey gardens and the largest indoor waterfall in the world. The practice responsible for the architecture is Safdie Architects, which has already designed one of the city's landmarks, the Marina Bay Sands, consisting of three connected skyscrapers. The architects explain that “the heart and soul of Changi Airport” can set new standards in airport design.

The new attraction in the airport, “The Jewel”, invites you to relax and discover – but you need to schedule in some time to do so, because the jewel can only be visited after entering the city-state. More than 65 million passengers a year visit the airport, whose Terminals 1, 2 and 3 are now connected by a 137,000 square metre glass complex with pedestrian bridges – an impressive piece of architecture. External visitors can also visit the entertainment temple and, after five years of construction, benefit from more than 280 shops and restaurants or stroll through the forest in the middle of the airport. The “Forest Valley”, a huge garden that extends over four of the ten floors, some of them underground, forms a jungle, crossed by two paths, with its countless trees, ferns and other plants.

Leisure park at the airport

Versatile architecture: “Canopy Park” will open its doors on the fifth floor of the circular building in the middle of the year – this leisure park extends over 14,000 square metres and will include two gardens, a 50-metre-long bridge with a glass-floor, a hall of mirrors and a maze. However, the main attraction of the new jewel is the largest indoor waterfall in the world, the “Rain Vortex”, which pours down 40 metres, over seven floors, from a funnel in the building’s glass dome. During the monsoon season, around 40,000 litres of rainwater fall every minute, cooling and humidifying the building and its plant life to then be recycled. This is just one of the measures that ensure the sustainability of the new attraction at Singapore Airport.