CapitaSpring: How a Green Skyscraper in Singapore Works

CapitaSpring is a 280-metre, 51-storey tower in Raffles Place that looks, at first glance, like a crisp office building whose facade has been pulled open to let a jungle out. Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) with Carlo Ratti Associati, it stacks a hawker centre, a car park, serviced apartments, offices and several gardens in a single building on a compact downtown site.

This article explains how the building is organised, how its greenery is integrated rather than applied, and what that asks of the structure and facade. All figures below come from the developer’s published fact sheet and the project’s award citations.

The site and the brief

CapitaSpring replaced a former public car park and hawker centre in the heart of the financial district, on a site of about 65,700 square feet between Market Street, Malacca Street and Phillip Street. The brief was unusual: rebuild the public car park and the food centre the area relied on, and add a large office tower and a serviced residence above them, without losing the street-level life of the old site. The developer was a partnership of CapitaLand Development, CapitaLand Integrated Commercial Trust and Mitsubishi Estate.

BIG and Carlo Ratti Associati were the concept architects, with RSP Architects Planners & Engineers as project architect. Meinhardt Singapore was the civil and structural engineer, Squire Mech the mechanical and electrical engineer, COEN Design International the landscape designer and Dragages Singapore the main contractor. Construction was completed in November 2021 and the building opened in 2022.

How CapitaSpring stacks its uses

The vertical organisation is the key to understanding the building. From the ground up:

Level 1: a sheltered, 18-metre-tall public City Room and retail, opening onto a park created by pedestrianising part of Market Street.
Levels 2 to 3: a hawker centre with 56 stalls, rehoused from the original site.
Levels 4 to 8: car parking.
Levels 9 to 16: a 299-unit serviced residence.
Levels 17 to 20: the Green Oasis, a four-storey garden.
Levels 21 to 49: Grade A offices.
Level 51: the rooftop Sky Garden, with an urban farm of almost 5,000 square feet.

Each of these uses has different needs for floor-to-floor height, structural grid, fire separation, ventilation and access. A car park wants long clear spans for parking bays and ramps; a hawker centre needs exhaust, drainage and heavy service loads; apartments want shorter spans and private outlook; offices want deep, column-free floors. Stacking them is a feat of coordination as much as design.

The Green Oasis

The most celebrated part of CapitaSpring is the Green Oasis, a naturally ventilated, four-storey garden that separates the residential floors from the offices. A spiralling promenade about 312 metres long winds through it, creating voids that bring light and air deep into the planting. The developer reports more than 38,000 plants across about 42,900 square feet of landscaped area, with over 160 trees that can grow to between four and ten metres.

The planting is arranged like a rainforest section. Higher, sunnier levels use species with smaller leaves and open branches that let wind pass through without damage; lower, shadier levels use shade-tolerant plants with larger leaves. More than 63 per cent of the species are native. This is biophilic design treated as a technical discipline, with plant choice responding to exposure, wind and light at height. Across the whole building, the total landscaped area is reported as more than 90,000 square feet, about 140 per cent of the site area.

What the greenery asks of the structure

From an engineering standpoint, a garden in the middle of a tower is a heavy, wet, windy and dynamic thing. Saturated soil, planters and trees add substantial permanent load, and mature trees continue to gain weight for decades. The Green Oasis also removes large areas of floor to create its spiralling voids, which interrupts the normal action of slabs as horizontal diaphragms carrying wind forces to the core. The surrounding structure must be designed to provide those load paths in other ways.

Wind at height is another design case. Trees must be restrained against overturning, and the open sides of a naturally ventilated garden must deliver comfortable conditions rather than gusts. Drainage, waterproofing and root barriers over occupied space must be durable and maintainable, because leaks in a sky garden are notoriously difficult to trace. These are the same principles we describe in our guide to the sky garden, applied here at an unusually large scale.

Column-free offices above

Above the Green Oasis, the office floors offer column-free plates of about 22,000 square feet, with a core-to-facade depth of between 10 and 18 metres and a ceiling height of 3.2 metres. Long, column-free spans give tenants flexibility but require deeper or post-tensioned floor structures and careful control of vibration and deflection. Our overview of tall building structural systems explains how cores and perimeter frames typically share the work in a tower of this height.

The facade: fins that open up

CapitaSpring’s facade is made of vertical aluminium fins in a pinstripe pattern. Across most of the tower they run straight and close together, providing a degree of shading and a unified skin. Where gardens and communal spaces occur, the fins peel apart to reveal the planting behind, so the building’s greenery is visible from the street without the whole tower becoming a green wall. It is an elegant way of tying a very mixed programme into one coherent object.

A facade like this involves more engineering than its simplicity suggests. Fins must resist wind, including vortex shedding that can cause vibration in slender elements, and their fixings must accommodate the movement of the building frame and thermal expansion. Our guide to facade engineering covers these issues in more detail.

Recognition and wider significance

CapitaSpring achieved the BCA Green Mark Platinum award and the Universal Design Mark GoldPLUS award in 2018, and later received the President’s Design Award. More importantly, it shows how a downtown tower can return public functions, such as a hawker centre, car park and public garden, rather than displacing them. It sits in a lineage of Singapore towers, including those designed by WOHA, that treat landscape as part of the building’s section rather than as decoration. Compared with the more conventional, though highly engineered, Guoco Tower, it represents a different idea of what a CBD tower should give back.

Frequently asked questions

Who designed CapitaSpring?

CapitaSpring was designed by Bjarke Ingels Group in collaboration with Carlo Ratti Associati, with RSP Architects Planners & Engineers as project architect and Meinhardt Singapore as civil and structural engineer.

How tall is CapitaSpring?

It is 280 metres tall and has 51 storeys, topped by a rooftop Sky Garden with an urban farm on level 51.

What is the Green Oasis at CapitaSpring?

The Green Oasis is a four-storey, naturally ventilated garden on levels 17 to 20, with a spiralling walkway of about 312 metres, more than 38,000 plants and over 160 trees, sitting between the serviced residence and the offices.

Is there still a hawker centre at CapitaSpring?

Yes. The hawker centre from the original site was rebuilt on levels 2 and 3 of the new building, with 56 stalls, below five levels of car parking.

Considering planting, roof gardens or heavy new loads on an existing structure? Talk to our consultancy or get in touch.