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Singapore’s Stunning ‘Jewel Changi’ Airport Celebrates One-Year Anniversary With New Film

By Samantha Pires on November 22, 2020

Jewel Changi Airport by Safdie Architects

Singapore’s Jewel Changi airport is so stunningly futuristic that it hardly feels real. The half-marketplace, half-garden airport center provides 24-hour landside entertainment for all airport visitors while pushing the envelope for future headhouses and airport terminals. Now, Safdie Architects is celebrating its project’s one-year anniversary with a new film produced by Helen Han Creative.

Garden of Wonder pans around Jewel’s unreal interior gardens, opening with perfectly framed shots of the structure above. The four-minute-long piece allows us to experience the gardens as if we are actually there, and it provides wide-angle views that uncover the entirety of the “forest valley” that makes Jewel so green.

The star of the film is, of course, the central water piece, which has won the title of the largest indoor waterfall in the world. Visitors in Han’s film can be seen marveling at the water as they complete the carefully composed procession towards the center of Jewel. If Changi airport was not already on your travel bucket list, watching the visitors interact with the gardens, sky nets, and hedge mazes will surely change your mind. It's no wonder why the building recently won the title of “World's Best Airport” for the eighth-straight year in a row.

Han, an architectural designer and instructor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, explains how she hopes to reach those who watch her film, “I recognize the privilege to be able to study and be exposed to the profession of architecture. I offer my work as a shared lens, to expose and expand people’s critical comprehension to the role of architecture in shaping the global environment.”