Sky Habitat Singapore: Moshe Safdie’s Vertical Garden Towers

Sky Habitat Singapore is a 509 unit residential complex in Bishan, designed by Safdie Architects and completed in 2015. Two stepped 38 storey towers are linked by three bridging sky gardens at levels 14, 26 and 38, which carry planting, communal rooms and a rooftop lap pool into the air rather than leaving them at ground level.

Most condominium developments in dense Asian cities answer the amenity question the same way. The pool, the gym and the gardens sit on a podium, and identical floor plates stack above them. Residents on level 30 share exactly the same ground floor facilities as residents on level 3, and they have to travel the full height of the building to reach any of it. Sky Habitat starts from a different assumption: that shared outdoor space should climb with the residents.

What Makes Sky Habitat Singapore Different From a Standard Tower?

The difference is porosity. Instead of two solid slabs, the massing steps back as it rises, and the void between the towers stays open. Breezes pass through the middle of the complex and daylight reaches deep into the plan, which matters far more in Singapore’s climate than it would in a temperate city. Safdie Architects describe the result as a three dimensional matrix of homes with terraces, balconies and communal gardens, closer to a hillside town than to a tower block.

The stepping is not only a silhouette. Over one third of the units sit along the stepped edges and open onto exterior roof garden terraces, the kind of outdoor room normally reserved for a penthouse. The north tower splays outward at its base, producing terraces that continue all the way down to the ground and creating a fifteen storey atrium beneath them.

At ground level, more than 70 percent of the site sits above a sunken parking podium and is given over to gardens, outdoor event areas, swimming pools, a tennis court and walking paths. Burying the cars is what makes that figure possible, and it is a decision worth studying in any high density scheme where the parking ratio usually eats the landscape budget. For related approaches at building scale, see our overview of vertical architecture examples.

Why Do the Sky Bridges Sit at Levels 14, 26 and 38?

The bridges land on the building’s thirds. Placing them at levels 14, 26 and 38 divides the 38 storey height into roughly equal segments, so no resident is more than six or seven floors from a garden deck. Interconnecting the two towers also means every amenity serves both, which effectively doubles the shared space available to each household.

Each bridge has its own character. The level 14 garden is the quiet one, with water features, seating and shade from an array of Bucida canopy trees, and it sits beside indoor kitchens and rain protected lounges that spill onto it. Level 26 is the active deck: sculptures on a raised, turf covered earth mound, semi private nooks for outdoor dining, and fitness rooms and a multipurpose dance studio flanking the bridge. The top bridge carries a 40 meter lap pool that runs end to end between the towers, with open views east and west.

Spanning between two independent towers is not a trivial structural move. Each tower deflects under wind load and settles differently over time, so the connection detail has to accommodate relative movement while still supporting a live load that includes several hundred tons of water. Prefabrication kept most of that welding on the ground, where quality control is easier and the schedule is not hostage to weather at 130 meters.

How the Stepped Form Handles a Tropical Climate

Singapore sits just north of the equator, which means high humidity, strong overhead sun and rain that arrives fast. The stepped geometry responds to all three. Units gain multiple orientations relative to the sun, so a single apartment can be cross ventilated instead of relying entirely on air conditioning. Terraces that project beyond the floor below shade the glazing underneath them. The open central void keeps the complex from behaving like a single sealed mass.

The landscape carries the same logic to the ground. A 50 meter lap pool sits among palms with fitness and lounge areas beside it, a second leisure pool has a shaded palm island for children, and a series of reflecting pools extends beneath the towers so that interior and exterior spaces read as continuous. Outdoor kitchens and barbecue areas are placed under building shade or tree cover rather than in open sun. Compared with facade mounted planting systems, which need constant irrigation and replacement, this is a lower maintenance route to the same result, a point worth weighing against the approaches covered in our piece on vertical gardens and urban jungles.

Sky Habitat Bishan and Safdie’s Housing Line From Habitat 67

The idea did not start in Singapore. Moshe Safdie built Habitat 67 for the Montreal World Exposition in 1967, stacking 354 prefabricated concrete modules into 158 homes so that each dwelling received a private terrace and more than one exposure. Nearly fifty years later, Sky Habitat runs the same argument through a tropical high rise: density does not have to cost you the garden.

On a site tour before completion, Safdie described his method plainly, saying that form is formed from within rather than imposed from the outside, and that the pyramid stepping came out of wanting gardens open to the sky rather than out of a preferred silhouette. That sequence, program first and profile second, separates Sky Habitat from towers whose sculptural shape is decided before the unit plans are drawn.

Sky Habitat was Safdie’s second major Singapore project after Marina Bay Sands in 2010, and it was followed by Jewel Changi Airport in 2019. Across those three Moshe Safdie buildings the constant is landscape treated as structure rather than decoration, and all three were built on the same developer relationship.

Sky Habitat Singapore at a Glance

The project data below is drawn from the architect’s own record of the scheme.

Sky Habitat and Singapore’s Other Stacked Housing Experiment

Sky Habitat did not appear in isolation. Singapore has spent two decades testing what happens when large residential schemes are asked to give back the greenery they displace, and the results now form a small canon of singapore green buildings that planners elsewhere study closely. The Pinnacle@Duxton, with its two continuous sky bridges linking seven public housing blocks, took the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat’s 10 Year Award in 2019. Two of the projects that followed took the same award in the years after.

Setting the two side by side is instructive because the client was the same and the years were almost the same. The Interlace needed eight hectares to work. Sky Habitat had a compact suburban plot next to Bishan MRT and no such luxury, which is precisely why the shared space had to go up. If your site is tight, the horizontal village model is unavailable, and the bridge becomes the only way to give every floor a piece of ground.

That constraint is the reason the project keeps appearing in tall building research. For the longer engineering story behind buildings of this height, our guide to the evolution of skyscraper architecture covers how structural systems developed to make these spans practical, and our overview of green architecture strategies sets the planting decisions in a wider context.

What the Market Made of Sky Habitat

The architectural reception and the commercial reception moved in opposite directions, and that gap is the most useful part of the story for anyone designing housing. When the project launched in April 2012, buyers took close to 70 percent of the units released on the first weekend, according to reporting in Today at the time. Momentum then collapsed. Only a handful of further units sold the following month, and the development sat unsold through the cooling measures that followed.

CapitaLand relaunched it in 2014 at prices roughly 10 to 15 percent below the original 2012 levels, a move The Straits Times reported in August that year, and the complex was completed the following August. Coverage at the time framed Sky Habitat as a lesson in pricing a suburban address at central district levels, not as a criticism of the building.

A decade on, the design case has held up better than the sales case. The building was a finalist in three separate 2016 award categories, and in 2025 it received the CTBUH 10 Year Award, which is given only to projects judged on how they have actually performed after ten years of occupation rather than on how they photographed at handover. Coverage by Dezeen and the project documentation on ArchDaily remain the most complete published records of the scheme. The bridges that made the towers expensive to build are now the reason the building is still discussed, and residents use them daily. Very few residential projects of the same generation can claim both.

Property price figures cited here are historical, drawn from reporting at the time of the launch and relaunch, and do not reflect current market values.