the FT architecture critic’s guide

This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to Singapore

Characterised by its cocktail of colonial heritage, sleek skyscrapers and lush, seemingly unstoppable outbursts of tropical greenery, Singapore can look like a fantasy future city, almost unreal at times in its contrasts and juxtapositions of the picturesque and the hyper-modern.  

The island city-state has made and remade its identity through striking landmarks and strange, sci-fi architectures. It can appear visionary, a gleaming model of a sustainable city, and it can appear disheartening, littered with buildings conceived as statements yet with apparently little interesting to say.  

Nevertheless, Singapore has become a kind of laboratory, a testing ground for extreme architecture, the success (or otherwise) of which filters out increasingly rapidly to the rest of the world.  

With a need to develop a postcolonial identity in the mid 1960s, both government and business decided to seek that new image through the construction of an architecture as modern as any elsewhere. Much of what was built was housing to replace the city’s sprawling informal settlements, and it remains a city where most people live in good-quality government- subsidised housing (a fact often ignored by the free-marketeers who hold Singapore up as an exemplar of market freedoms). But there were also office towers, Brutalist buildings (often designed by major international architects), slick skyscrapers and generous public spaces. Then, in the 21st century, the architecture was turned up a notch with blockbuster spectacles including Marina Bay Sands and Gardens by the Bay — the advent of fridge-magnet architecture. 

This mix of bizarre form-making and high-tech, of biophilia and occasional real innovation, makes it a place of architectural pilgrimage, a blend of the radical, the comical and, very probably, the future.  

Jewel Changi Airport (2019)

Floors B5—5D, Singapore Changi Airport

If Singapore is aiming for its defining characteristic to be its greenery, the sales pitch starts as soon as you land. At the centre of Jewel Changi Airport is the gushing sound of the world’s largest indoor waterfall (the HSBC Rain Vortex) cascading from the centre of the latticed dome and a tropical forest, all beneath a doughnut-shaped glass roof. Changi has long been recognised as one of the world’s most remarkable airports but this centrepiece really is breathtaking, even for the most jaded of global travellers and transiters. It was designed by the Israeli-Canadian-US architect Moshe Safdie, who also redefined Singapore’s skyline with the Marina Bay Sands (see below). The airport also, incidentally, features an enchanting and improbable butterfly garden. Perhaps, when the planet has overheated and has been extracted to death, this is what nature we will have left. Website; Directions

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Marina Bay Sands (2010)

Bayfront Avenue, Singapore 018956

A high-tech Stonehenge with a surfboard balanced on top, Marina Bay Sands has become Singapore’s most visible landmark. Containing a vast casino (owned by Las Vegas Sands), super-luxe hotel towers, shops, celebrity-chef dining spots and one of the world’s most spectacular, if anxiety-inducing, infinity pools, it is the work of the Jewel Changi Airport designer, Moshe Safdie. For better or for worse, it transformed the city’s skyline, propelling it into a space age future. Impossible to ignore. If you’re there anyway, it’s worth checking out Foster + Partners’ Apple store, sited on its own island accessible by a walkway and beneath a glass dome, a little like the one he designed for Berlin’s Reichstag. Probably the slickest and most exclusive tech shop on the planet. Website; Directions

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Gardens by the Bay (2012)

Marina Gardens Drive, Singapore 018953

Greenery was clearly not enough for this botanical garden sited on land reclaimed from the Singapore Strait. The fantastic flowers are supplemented by a barrage of spectacular structures, from the “Supertrees” that sprout from the earth as alien-looking armatures for creepers and climbers (as well as supercharged multicoloured lampposts) to the humpbacked greenhouses that (this is the tropics, after all) emulate the planet’s more temperate environments. If they look like a 21st-century response to the great glasshouses of London — the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Palm and Temperate Houses at Kew — it is no accident. Their designer, Chris Wilkinson, is a Brit who draws influence from these incredible feats of Victorian engineering. Lit up like a gaudy Christmas wonderland after dark and buzzing with colour, flower and insect life, the Gardens by the Bay reinforce the super-modern unreality of Singapore, like a place that seems CGI’d, as if it might not actually exist yet. But it absolutely does. Website; Directions

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National Gallery Singapore (2015)

1 St Andrew’s Road, Singapore 178957

The former Supreme Court building reopened in 2015 as a huge art gallery, designed by French architects StudioMilou. The colonial-era classical building is a solid, frankly dour structure, but the architects managed to inject a little tropical flair with a slender, sweeping entrance canopy and sun screening that dapples the floor in light throughout. Really very nicely done. It houses a huge and impressively varied collection of south-east Asian art, vibrant and mostly unfamiliar to westerners. Website; Directions

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Lau Pa Sat hawker market (1894)

18 Raffles Quay, Singapore 048582

It’s not contemporary but it is modern, a prefabricated cast-iron structure made from components manufactured by the Saracen Foundry in Glasgow in the 1890s — an excellent example of modular colonial construction. It has proved a fantastically resilient and well-used building, and its hawker stalls prefigure the modern food court: open, airy, hygienic and efficient. Its plan is radial, with arms shooting out from a central clock tower (very Victorian) and, although it isn’t a huge building, it has an array of stalls and seating around it that allow it to radiate out into the city. It is now a last remnant of low-rise construction, dwarfed but not overwhelmed by the surrounding towers. This is an architecture as much of scents and sounds as it is of shelter, a good opportunity to escape the air-con and one with a terrific choice of cuisines, fast-noodle spots and ruggedly unluxurious communal seating. Website; Directions

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Golden Mile Complex (1973)

5001 Beach Road, Singapore 199588

This visionary Brutalist structure dates from 1973, and in its mountainous stepped form you can see hints of the early-20th-century Futurist architect Antonio Sant’Elia and of contemporary developments in the UK (such as the Brunswick Centre and Alexandra Road estates in London), Italy (the “Lavatrici” or “washing machines” in Genoa) and the US (Paul Rudolph’s unrealised megastructure for the Lower Manhattan Expressway). Designed by Design Partnership Architects, it housed a mix of apartments, offices, shops, a large supermarket and outdoor recreation spaces. Once the heart of the island’s Thai population, it closed in 2023 but is being redeveloped with plans to preserve its historical structure. Directions

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The Interlace (2013)

180 Depot Road, Singapore 109684

This odd stack of buildings by OMA and Ole Scheeren in the west of the city is both bizarre and brilliant — it represented an entirely new way to arrange blocks in a big development to break up the mass and create a sense of place through enclosure without any concomitant claustrophobia. The residential blocks wrap around a series of interconnecting courtyards, with pools and play areas and drum-shaped lights for the levels below. Extremely striking and still cool. Scheeren was also responsible for the Duo towers, back nearer the centre of the city, a distinctive pair of skyscrapers wrapped in a honeycomb grid curving around a shady tropical garden and containing apartments and a hotel. Website; Directions

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21 Carpenter (2024)

21 Carpenter Street, Singapore 059984

Built around (and over) a group of surviving 1930s shophouses in Singapore’s Chinatown, this aluminium-swathed boutique hotel is a surprising and deft new piece of work. It was designed by local practice WOHA, which has been responsible for some of Singapore’s most striking contemporary buildings and a lot of the neighbourhood’s lushest luxury hotels. 21 Carpenter is screened by its perforated metal facade upon which punched quotes occasionally appear. The historic buildings were a remittance house where Chinese labourers would send their wages home, and the phrases are taken from some of their accompanying letters, which were typed up by clerks: poignant and deeply affiliated with place and history. Website; Directions

Also interesting is WOHA’s Parkroyal Collection Pickering, a bigger hotel with sleek towers emerging from a concrete base that looks eroded and ruined, overgrown with vegetation. A kind of optimistic, high-tech vision of the post-apocalypse. 

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Late modernism

Singapore proved surprisingly receptive to the work of the masters of modernism once they had fallen slightly out of fashion elsewhere. That foresight now means the city-state has some of the best examples of the late style of some of architecture’s biggest names. 

Chief among them is probably Paul Rudolph’s The Colonnade (1980), an apartment tower on Grange Road. It was a development from the architect’s unbuilt designs for the Graphic Arts Center of Manhattan. It looks like a stack of prefab pods, but the technology to build them wasn’t quite there so the concrete was poured in situ instead. New York’s loss was Singapore’s gain.  

You might also take a look at One Raffles Place (1986), one of the later works of the Japanese great Kenzo Tange. He was well past his more Brutalist (or more accurately Metabolist) phase, and this smooth, slick tower is sharp and a little strange, as if there were a false perspective in play. The spiky, stripy and very striking The Gateway towers (1990) seem to be in a similar architectural idiom. This one is by IM Pei, who worked a lot in Singapore in his later years, including also the OCBC Centre (1986), a solid castle tower of a skyscraper with protruding block bays of fenestration — an intriguing and chunky survival. These are not the usual exuberant buildings that characterise the city, but rather a kind of technocratic modernism that set the background for its reputation as modern, clean and efficient.  

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Contemporary fluff

There is much modern architecture in Singapore that is billed as cutting edge but is actually pretty daft, superficial or unhelpful. Even the worst, though, is usually striking and may be worth seeking out for the Insta thrill- seekers among you. Among these is Thomas Heatherwick’s 2013 Hive Learning Hub at Nanyang Technology University. It is a tottering cluster of cylinders with insane amounts of concrete bulging out, barely able to contain its interior. The courtyard is, despite my reservations, an interesting space, but the green fuzz on top meant to make it super-sustainable looks like a weak apology for its carbon footprint. (The recent fashion to drape and dangle every new structure with greenery is most visible in Singapore. The upside is that it does hide a lot of mediocre architecture.)

In the Downtown Core, BIG and Carlo Ratti Associati’s CapitaSpring tower (2022) with its fluid, applied facade looks like the work of a Zaha Hadid tribute band. Maybe take a look at the concrete lots of the ArtScience Museum (2011) by Moshe Safdie by Marina Bay if you want to see the downsides of shapism and the relentless and tiring quest for architectural icons. But Singapore remains a place where designers go to try stuff out, a lab in which the experiments, triumphs, failures and the rest all remain on show.  

What are your favourite and least-favourite Singapore buildings? Tell us in the comments below. And follow FT Globetrotter on Instagram at @FTGlobetrotter