Jewel Changi Airport

• 1. Introduction

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  Jewel Changi Airport rises beside Terminals 1, 2, and 3 of Changi Airport in Singapore. At its center falls the Rain Vortex, the world's tallest indoor waterfall, standing 40 meters high. A terraced forest wraps around the falling water, and gardens, shops, and a hotel fill the storeys around it. The complex covers 135,700 square meters across ten storeys, five above ground and five below. Roughly 300,000 people pass through it every day. Changi itself sits at the eastern end of Singapore, about 20 kilometers from the city's Downtown Core. What pushed Singapore to build a waterfall and a forest inside an airport terminal complex? Who designed a dome wide enough to hold both? And how did a retail complex end up in music videos and a television finale?

• 2. Conception

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  In 2013, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong first raised the idea in his National Day Rally speech. He framed it as part of a plan to double Changi Airport's capacity by the mid-2020s. He said the expansion would "create more opportunities for Singapore and Singaporeans."

  The site chosen was the former open-air car park in front of Changi Airport Terminal 1. Building there let planners expand Terminal 1's arrival hall and baggage reclaim areas by 70 percent. Its handling capacity was also expected to rise from 21 to 24 million passengers a year.

  Changi Airport Group and CapitaLand formed a joint venture, Jewel Changi Airport Trustee Pte Ltd, to develop the concept. CapitaLand did so through its shopping mall arm, CapitaLand Mall Asia. The project cost S$1.7 billion. No government funds or taxpayer money were used, even though both companies are wholly or partially owned by Singapore's state investment firm, Temasek Holdings.

  Lee officially opened Jewel on the 18th of October 2019, six months after its soft opening. In that first stretch it had already drawn 50 million visitors, blowing past an initial target of 40-50 million for the whole year. By 2024, annual footfall had climbed past 80 million, its highest total since opening. The glass-and-steel dome sheltering all of it was the work of a consortium led by Moshe Safdie, the architect behind Marina Bay Sands.

• 3. Designing The Dome

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  Moshe Safdie's consortium worked alongside local firm RSP Architects Planners & Engineers, who served as executive architects and structural engineers. PWP Landscape Architecture took on the landscaping. The firm had co-designed the National 9/11 Memorial in New York City and had worked with Safdie on Marina Bay Sands. Benoy handled the interiors, BuroHappold Engineering worked on the facade, and Lighting Planners Associates designed the lighting. WET Design, a water design firm, engineered the Rain Vortex itself.

  Safdie described the goal as blending a marketplace with an urban park. "The component of the traditional mall is combined with the experience of nature, culture, education, and recreation, aiming to provide an uplifting experience," he said. "By drawing both visitors and local residents alike, we aim to create a place where the people of Singapore interact with the people of the world."

  Steel framing holds the dome's glass panels across a complex latticework. At night the dome glows and can be seen from the surrounding area. It stood as a construction site for years before its 2019 opening. Under that dome, engineers still had to prove the roof could drop enormous volumes of water without flooding the mall below.

• 4. The Rain Vortex And Forest Valley

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  Recirculated rainwater is pumped to the roof and falls through a round hole at up to 37,850 liters per minute into a basement-level pool. An acrylic funnel at the bottom stops the water from splashing and muffles the sound of the fall. The toroid-shaped roof holds more than 9,000 pieces of glass across a span of 200 by 150 meters. A sloped oculus at its center forms the waterfall's mouth. That oculus has been described as "a continuation of the building... completed in a liquid form."

  To keep humidity in check, the waterfall's flow shifts between heavy cascades and lighter trickles, cutting down on air turbulence. WET Design's engineers tested a one-fifth-scale model and then a full-size partial prototype before construction. The Changi Airport Skytrain runs near the waterfall too, letting passengers who never leave the airside zone still catch a glimpse of the Vortex.

  Around that falling water spreads the Forest Valley, one of Asia's largest indoor gardens, at roughly 22,000 square meters across five storeys. It holds around 3,000 trees and 60,000 shrubs from 120 species, all native to high-altitude tropical forests. From there, the terraced land keeps rising toward whatever waits at the very top.

• 5. Canopy Park

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  At the top of Jewel sits a 14,000 square meter garden level, home to about half of the complex's total landscaping. Two gardens anchor it: the Topiary Walk, lined with animal-shaped hedges at every corner, and the Petal Garden, which rotates seasonal floral displays. The Mastercard Canopy Bridge crosses 23 meters above the ground and runs 50 meters long. A glass-panel floor at its center looks straight down to level 1.

  At the park's eastern end sit two mazes. The Hedge Maze, Singapore's largest, has walls standing 1.8 meters high. Visitors can push its gates inward to reroute their own path through it. It ends at an elevated watchtower with a view of the whole maze. The Mirror Maze sits beneath the dome, using mirrors and reflections under a canopy of branching plants.

  The Bouncing Net stretches 250 meters and hangs 8 meters above the ground at its highest point. A separate 50 meter Walking Net lets visitors look down 25 meters to level 1. The Discovery Slides were designed by Carve and built by Playpoint in Singapore. They combine two tube slides and two sliding surfaces on one sloped structure. That structure rises from 3 meters on one end to nearly 7 meters on the other, giving riders a view of the Forest Valley and the Rain Vortex on the way down. Four Foggy Bowls, each 30 to 65 centimeters deep, release mist so visitors can jump in and feel like they are playing among clouds.

  The Changi Experience Studio sits apart from the greenery entirely. It packs 3,000 square meters of interactive games and displays into one space. The exhibit is built to reveal how the airport actually runs behind the scenes. That studio's look behind the scenes hinted at a very different kind of stay just one level down: an actual hotel bed.

• 6. Shops, Stays And Transit

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  Yotel opened a roughly 130-room hotel inside Jewel on the 12th of April 2019. Travelers can use an integrated multi-modal transport lounge for ticketing, boarding pass collection, and baggage transfer in one stop. Early check-in counters also accept luggage up to 24 hours before regular check-in times.

  Jewel's roughly 300 retail and dining outlets include the first Apple Store built inside an airport complex. It also holds the first permanent Pokemon Center in Asia outside Japan. Muji, Zara, Uniqlo, Don Don Donki, and Massimo Dutti sit alongside a Shaw Theatres cinema with an IMAX screen and a FairPrice Finest supermarket. Athleisure brands fill out the mix too, among them Nike, Adidas, Descente, On, Fila, and New Balance.

  Dining ranges from Shake Shack and A&W Restaurants to homegrown names like Jumbo Seafood, Bee Cheng Hiang, Bengawan Solo, Ya Kun Kaya Toast, and Irvins. That mix of local flavor and global brands would later catch the attention of award juries well beyond Singapore.

• 7. Awards And Recognition

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  The Chicago Athenaeum, an international museum of architecture and design, gave Jewel Changi Airport its 2016 International Architecture Award. That recognition came before the building had even opened to the public. In November 2019, weeks after that public opening, it picked up the Special Jury Award at the Mapic Awards.

  In 2024, the Singapore Retailers Association let the public vote, and Jewel was named "My Favourite Shopping Mall" at the SRA Retail Awards. Tripadvisor followed in 2025 with its Travellers' Choice Award, built from millions of traveler reviews and placing the airport among the top 10 percent worldwide. Awards from architecture juries and traveler polls told one story. Screens far from Singapore were about to tell another.

• 8. In Popular Culture

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  Singaporean singer JJ Lin drew inspiration from Jewel for his song "The Right Time," featuring the complex in its music video. Coldplay's music video for their 2024 song "Man in the Moon" also used Jewel as a setting. The complex appeared once more in the fourth-season finale of the television series "Hacks." For travelers who never enter its terminals, Jewel now exists first as a scene in someone else's song or show.