CapitaSpring Wins 11th International High-Rise Award

It has been a good year, award-wise, for tall buildings in Singapore. Just last month WOHA's Pan Pacific Orchard, a 23-story hotel on Orchard Road, was named the 2024 Best Tall Building Worldwide by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH). And today the latest 50,000-euro International High-Rise Award was given to the team behind CapitaSpring, the 51-story, 280-meter (920-foot) mixed-use tower designed by BIG and Carlo Ratti Associati for developer CapitaLand. The winners of these two major skyscraper awards make similar statements: elevated landscapes increase the sustainability of towers and the cities where they are located.

Focusing on the International High-Rise Award, CapitaSpring's victory follows 3XN's Quay Quarter Tower in Sydney, which was the winner of the 10th iteration in 2022/23. By reusing a substantial amount of an existing tower's structure, Quay Quarter Tower set a high bar for sustainable reuse, and its architect, Kim Herforth Nielsen of 3XN, set out the main criteria for the jury to decide the winner from 31 nominated projects: “Over and above beauty and technical ingenuity,” a statement from DAM reads, “the jury’s assessment was thus based specifically on the social value of each project as a ‘good neighbor,’ its sustainable character, how innovative it is in solving local issues, and whether it offered a good, future-proof design.” The jury's decision in selecting CapitaSpring based on these criteria was unanimous.

CapitaSpring, like Pan Pacific Orchard, is very much a product of its location in Singapore. The city-state mandates that buildings downtown follow its “Green Plot Ratio” (GnPR) requirement, which basically says that new buildings must provide green space in a 1:1 site ratio. With a green zone straddling the 17th to 20th floors and a sky garden with small urban garden on the roof, Capita Spring exceeds the requirement, providing a ratio of 1:1.4. It goes without saying that Singapore's tropical climate helps make such vertical green spaces thrive.

Also of its place is the mix of uses and, more importantly, the provision for functions that were on the site previously. For the first, the tower has two primary functions: serviced residential and office, the former below the green zone and the latter's 29 floors above it. Before CapitaSpring was erected, the site held a parking garage and a street-food market, the Hawker Center, both of which were incorporated into the podium that the tower sits upon. Furthermore, a portion of Market Street was turned into a pedestrian space, increasing the public space in Singapore's CBD.

The jury's concluding remarks reiterate the above, justify CapitaSpring's victory, and hope such developments are not limited to Singapore: "We are honoring the city for giving the developer the right incentives, and the developer for seizing the initiative, and the architects for finding an innovative solution to it all. All of this is reflected in the quality of the architecture. CapitaSpring could simply not have been built elsewhere at present. Other cities can definitely learn from this.”