With the largest indoor waterfall and one of the world’s largest conditioned gardens, Jewel Changi Airport is a destination in its own right. As the gateway to Singapore, the “City in a Garden”, it is no wonder that almost 15% of the total area in Project Jewel is given over to internal gardens.
Arching over the gardens, waterfall and shops is a large glass roof measuring more than three times a football pitch. Atelier Ten provided strategic environmental design, analytical consultancy and conceptual services engineering on this unusual and challenging project.
Balancing the competing demands of abundant heat and light needed for plants, and superior passenger thermal comfort for people was one of the project’s key challenges. Using a combination of bespoke ray tracing and illuminance prediction software, we modelled the light coming through each triangular cell of the roof, for each hour of the year.
In addition to spectrally selective glazing, a frit pattern was applied in varying densities to modulate the light levels throughout the building. We collaborated with PWP landscape design to ensure that the building responded to the demands of plants. Species that require higher light levels were placed in areas with less frit, and vice versa.
Conditioning the entire void under the glass roof would have used enormous amounts of energy, so we developed a strategy to only condition occupied zones. Some of the zones are conditioned to ensure that comfort is a tangible experience, with higher air movement simulating breezes and providing variability of temperatures. The majority of the hard floor surfaces have embedded chilled water pipes, providing cooling only at the lowest level and allowing heat gains to rise through the space.
