Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie reveals his inspirations and aspirations for Singapore's Jewel Changi Airport and the upcoming tower at Marina Bay Sands
In Big Yellow Taxi, the pop song originally penned by Joni Mitchell, there’s a lament to urban blight in the lyric “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot”. Jewel Changi Airport, however, is singing a different tune. The 135,700sqm complex is built on the site of a former carpark, and now houses Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie’s vision of paradise: the world’s tallest indoor waterfall surrounded by a lush garden populated by thousands of trees, palms and shrubs that span 120 species.
We sat down with the genial Safdie to find out more about how he tackled this formidable project when he was in town to take journalists on a special guided tour of Jewel.
See also: Our Favourite Debuts At Jewel Changi Airport Singapore
What inspired the design of Jewel?
Moshe Safide (MS) We wanted to do something that would be timeless and universal, that people from all walks of life would want to keep coming back to. That led me to think of some great paradise, a mythical garden.
I am fascinated by the idea of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, as well as the book Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, in which explorer Marco Polo describes cities with gardens suspended in the sky. Another landscape I remember vividly is from the movie Avatar. So we wanted to create this feeling of a garden that has the promise of a greater life, a better life—an optimistic place.
If you go through, say, a rose garden, it gives great pleasure, but it is what it is. I think a mythical garden is one where nature becomes bigger than itself. Everybody always says that Singapore is a city of gardens, the Garden City. This kind of becomes a metaphor for that whole idea.