Skyscrapers in Singapore

The three-way tie at 280 meters

Singapore's airspace is crowded. Changi, Seletar and the military field at Paya Lebar all sit on an island 50 kilometers across, so the Civil Aviation Authority capped building height over the central business district to keep approach paths clear. The number was 280 meters, and developers aimed straight at it.

One Raffles Place Tower 1, built as OUB Centre to a Kenzo Tange design and finished in 1986, reached 280 m in 63 floors. UOB Plaza One, also Tange, matched it in 1995 with 62 floors. Republic Plaza, Kisho Kurokawa's octagonal tower that rotates its plan 45 degrees on the way up, matched it again the same year with 66. CapitaSpring joined the tie in 2021. Four towers within a few hundred meters of each other, all exactly as tall as each other, because the rule left nothing to argue about.

Guoco Tower, the first one allowed past

Guoco Tower in Tanjong Pagar broke the ceiling in 2016 at 290 meters and 64 floors, after the authority granted the site an exemption. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed it, and the stack is mixed: offices to the 38th floor, the Wallich Residence apartments from the 39th to the 64th, a Sofitel and retail over the Tanjong Pagar MRT station. At 290 m it is only ten meters clear of the towers it passed.

The next generation is not much taller. IOI Central Boulevard Towers, finished at Marina Bay in 2024 to an Ingenhoven Architects design, tops out at 238 m in its west tower, under the old cap, with planted terraces stepping down toward the water. Paya Lebar Air Base is due to close around 2030, and the height rules over the city are expected to change with it.

How many there are

Counting completed buildings at the 150 meter mark the Council on Vertical Urbanism uses, Singapore has roughly 140. That is a long way behind Hong Kong, which passes 550, but those 140 towers fit into 730 square kilometers, which puts Singapore's density of tall buildings among the highest anywhere. Our page on skyscraper cities ranks by count, and the Hong Kong page explains why the leader is so far ahead. Drop the bar to 100 meters and the Singapore total runs past a thousand, most of it housing, so what counts as a skyscraper is worth settling first.

Where they stand, and why up

Almost everything tall is in one band along the south coast: Raffles Place and Shenton Way for the banks, Tanjong Pagar behind them, Marina Bay on reclaimed land east of both. Walk 20 minutes inland and the office towers stop.

Close to six million people live on those 730 square kilometers, and about a fifth of the island is reclaimed land, so new ground is expensive to make. Reservoirs, catchment forest and the airfields take large bites out of the rest. The state owns the great majority of the land, and the Urban Redevelopment Authority writes a Master Plan that assigns a plot ratio to every parcel, so height here is allocated centrally.

The towers with plants on them

Since 2009 the Urban Redevelopment Authority has run a program called Landscaping for Urban Spaces and High-Rises, which requires a central development to put back greenery at least equal to the site area it covers, on roofs, terraces and planted facades. More than 550 projects have been built under it.

CapitaSpring on Market Street is the clearest case. Bjarke Ingels Group and Carlo Ratti split its aluminum louvers open to expose planted floors, including a four-story garden around 100 meters up and a rooftop farm that supplies the restaurants below. Oasia Hotel Downtown by WOHA takes the other approach: a red aluminum mesh over the whole facade with 21 climbing species growing through it, and sky gardens cut through the building at three levels. Its planted area comes to about eleven times the greenery the site held before.

Marina Bay Sands, 200 meters and the one everyone pictures

The building on every Singapore postcard is not in the top 30 by height. Marina Bay Sands is about 200 meters and 55 floors, and Moshe Safdie designed its three hotel towers to lean apart at the base and meet at the top. What sits on them is the SkyPark: a 340 meter deck spanning all three towers, with 67 meters of it cantilevered off the north tower over open air and an infinity pool running 146 meters along the edge, 191 meters above the street. It opened in 2010, and a 200 m hotel has outranked every taller tower in the photographs since.

Where most people actually live

About eight in ten Singaporeans live in flats built by the Housing and Development Board, and those blocks are tall. The Pinnacle@Duxton, finished in 2009, is the one architects point at: seven slabs of 50 stories on the site of Singapore's first HDB blocks, linked by two sky bridges at the 26th and 50th floors that run the full 500 meter length of the development. The upper bridge is a public park with a running track, open to visitors for a few dollars. Public housing at 50 floors with a skywalk on top says more about how Singapore builds than the office towers do.