The CapitaSpring tower wins the International High-Rise Award 2024/25

The final winner of the International High-Rise Award (IHA) 2024/25 has now been chosen: The mixed-use CapitaSpring tower in Singapore, masterminded by architectural practices BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group and Carlo Ratti Associati has come out tops in the competition for the world’s most innovative high-rise. The prize is EUR 50,000 and a statuette created by internationally renowned artist Thomas Demand.

On behalf of the architects, Brian Yang of BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group as well as Gregory Chua on behalf of the developers CapitaLand were present to take receipt of the award at the formal ceremony in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche, where it was bestowed by Mike Josef (Lord Mayor of the City of Frankfurt/Main), Dr. Matthias Danne (Deputy Chair of the Board of DekaBank) and Peter Cachola Schmal (Director of Deutsches Architekturmuseum).

When the jury convened for the 11^th International High-Rise Award, it was against the backdrop of the huge global challenges facing the built environment. The jury discussed at length the issue of what should define high-rises going forward, the role they have to play in urban society post-pandemic and in the midst of massive increases in urban populations – all within the context of the specific typology of tall buildings as the fastest growing architectural form. They agreed that the challenges can be summed up as the need to greenify, the need to densify, and the need to use what’s already in place to the greatest possible extent. Combining all three needs is the task facing architects and urban planners alike from now on, and it was in light of this that jury chair Kim Herforth Nielsen set out the main criteria the jury would apply when assessing the total of 31 projects. Over and above beauty and technical ingenuity, the jury’s assessment was thus based specifically on the social value of each project as a ‘good neighbor’, its sustainable character, how innovative it is in solving local issues, and whether it offered a good, future-proof design. After careful consideration of these criteria, the jury unanimously selected CapitaSpring in Singapore as the winner of the International High-Rise Award 2024/25.

CapitaSpring, the jury concluded, is “the best high-rise building in the world at the moment”. The jurors chose it because it combines the best of two worlds, balancing the city’s interests with those of private developers in an ideal architectural solution. CapitaSpring stands 280 meters tall on a site that for many years was wasteland used as a parking lot and a street-food market. Now, the high-rise incorporates both within its walls, symbolizing its strong ability to connect between the public and the private, between the office world up above and the two-floor hawker centre down below, where everyone meets for lunch. In-between is a breezy, naturally ventilated green zone straddling the 17th to 20th floors just below the tower’s serviced residential section, again publicly accessible, as are the sky gardens on the roof.

In the process, by virtue of remaining inclusive, CapitaSpring belongs to the city. The jury agreed that CapitaSpring is essentially successful as it is “co-designed” – because the city has a great planning regime and because the developer had a certain vision to make a private real estate office into a vertical public space. In this way, CapitaSpring moves the tall-building typology a crucial step forward – for the future of the city. While some of its open façades are specific to the local tropical climate, the general underlying idea of an open city-within-the-city, encouraged by cooperation between regulators and developers, can be transferred worldwide. As the jury concluded: “We are honoring the city for giving the developer the right incentives, and the developer for seizing the initiative, and the architects for finding an innovative solution to it all. All of this is reflected in the quality of the architecture. CapitaSpring could simply not have been built elsewhere at present. Other cities can definitely learn from this.”

Further information: The International High-Rise Award (international-highrise-award.com)