8. Jewel Changi Airport (Singapore)

Jewel Changi Airport (Singapore)

Jewel Changi Airport re-imagines the center of an airport as a major public realm attraction. Jewel offers a range of facilities for landside airport operations, indoor gardens and leisure attractions, retail offerings and hotel facilities, all under one roof. A distinctive dome-shaped facade made of glass and steel adds to Changi Airport’s appeal as one the world’s leading air hubs.

Based on the geometry of torus, the building is designed as a new central connector between the existing airport terminals at Singapore Changi Airport. At its core is the Forest Valley, terraced garden attractions that offers many spatial and interactive experiences for visitors. The Forest Valley also includes walking trails, cascading waterfalls, and quiet seating areas. Surrounding the garden is a multi-level retail marketplace on five levels, which features access to the garden via a series of vertical canyons.

Beneath a giant glass dome, where a waterfall plunges 130 feet through a forest, and a winding path leads past palms and fig trees, orchids, and anthurium, a robot came rolling around a bend.

I headed over to Jewel, which its architect, Moshe Safdie, described in Architectural Digest as a kind of "mystical paradise garden". Standing on a viewing deck amid its tall trees and thousands of lush shrubs. The waterfall puring right through the building, where I cant help but be enchanted. I marveled at its inventiveness, scale and beauty. Visitors wearing backpacks and wheeling luggage stopped to pose for photos, the falls hissing behind them like a newfangled Niagara. When sunlight hit the water just so, there was even a rainbow.

  The Rain Vortex plunges 130feet through a Forest.

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 The Forest Valley in the Jewel complex.

The trees and shrubs around the waterfall is surrounded by stores and restaurants, allowing visitors to keep one eye on the jungle-scape and other latest fashions or food and beverages shops. the result is a staggering display of artificiality and nature, with lights that can turn a waterfall crimson, or make it seem as if we 're dining al fresco under a starry sky.

Beneath that sky, on Jewel's tree-lined top floor, is Canopy Park, where we went to try theme-park style attractions (standard tickets for adults start at 5 dollars) : mazes, slides and the Manulife Sky Nets.

Visitors can walk 82 feet above Jewel on a "Sky Net".

Green, blooming spaces, eg: cactus, water lily and orchid gardens, ponds with koi. 

Jewel's indoor forest, beckon with flowering plants, palms and water flowing over rocks into pools and ponds. The soothing sound of water is one of Changi's most delightful features. Even in Jewel, while flitting from store to store, at some point we become aware of a quiet roar. Turn in its direction and where we expect to see yet another string of dazzling shops, you find instead that the wall has fallen away and in its place is an opening to another world, that massive waterfall splashing through a garden, a fine mist spraying up from the valley below.

We followed the water fall below ground, riding an escalator to the basement levels of Jewel, where the water barrels through an immense clear column encircled in part by tables for nearby eateries. We can see families and couples on the bench chatting, facing the falls, as if in a park. Others were snapping photos of children as they pressed their palms to the column between bites.

The architect designed a support system comprising a ring beam and 14 tree-like columns circling the edge of the roof, each column extending to 12 metres in height. This props up the entire roof facade around its perimeter, and this super-sized cantilevered roof is now literally suspended in air at 37 metres above ground.

A contiguous grid shell that weighs 4000 tonnes, equivalent to the weight of about 6 airbus 380planes. The roof spans an area pf 23410 sq. m, roughly the floor space of 213hdb five- room flats. It is 200m at its longest and 150m at its widest. 

                   

The façade is supported by 14 tree-like structures, each 12-meter tall. This allows the Shiseido forest valley and the Canopy Park to be column free. Light structures are defined as tensile/tension structures, frame supported, air supported, air inflated, cable net, cable-and-strut (also referred to as tensegrity), geodesic domes, and grid shells. 

Branching structures are usually referred to as tree-like structures/columns. However, their action cannot be compared with that of a natural tree. While the branches of a tree are under bending stress, bending forces are systematically avoided in technically constructed tree-like structures. The inner structure of the tree-like columns represents a type of framework that is unique in the construction industry. It is not a truss with a triangular structure, which would brace the structure, allows articulation joints between the truss elements, and prevents bending even under alternating loads. In the tree-like column.

Therefore, the individual elements must be rigidly connected at the joints. A tree-like column is particularly well suited for only the one main load scheme for which it is optimized. All other loading conditions will cause bending stresses within the structure.

                   

The facade  is made up of:

·  More than 9,000 pieces of specially-manufactured glass panels

·       About 18,000 pieces of steel beams

·       Over 6,000 steel nodes (pieces that encase the junction of the steels beams and glass panels)

                   

Each piece of glass is unique in size to create the necessary shape and structural support of Jewel’s iconic facade. In addition, each piece of glass is custom-made to fit into a specific grid based on the functional design of the facade.

The specifications of the glass panels are carefully considered given Jewel’s unique location within the Changi Airport aerodrome.

To ensure that noise levels of the aircraft are kept to a minimum in the building, the glass panels are designed to have an air gap of 16 millimetres (mm) to serve as insulation against the noise emitted.

A series of tests and research was also conducted to ascertain that the glare emitted off Jewel’s surface will not interfere with the daily operations of the air traffic controllers (since Changi Airport’s air traffic control tower is situated right next to Jewel).

The entire study, engineering and shortlisting of the glass material, took two years to complete. To make sure the precision for the glass to be installed at its current location, they have QR codes. The installation manager can scan the code (on the glass) and from this, the workers will know exactly where it is to be located on site.