Corporate Headquarters Plaza Water Feature
Corporate headquarters developer · Singapore · 316 Stainless
A still, mirror-calm pan at the centre of a headquarters forecourt, with water spilling over the full rim into a dark granite reservoir. The visible object is the water surface; everything that makes it work is below the paving.
The brief
Give the plaza a centrepiece that photographs well for corporate events and behaves predictably in a tropical downpour. Operating hours are 07:00 to 22:00, every day, for a building with a fifteen-year design life.
Design approach
A rim-overflow pan rather than a jet: the water surface is what reads, so the design problem is making the overflow film invisible and even. The pan is set 380 mm above the paving — high enough to sit on, low enough not to break the plaza’s sightlines.
Material & engineering
316 stainless for the pan and weir, in a 2 mm wall with a rolled rim ground to a 1.5 mm flat. The weir level is set by a laser-levelled rim, not by shims — the tolerance that matters is ±0.5 mm around a 17 m perimeter, because that is what makes the film even.
Pump sizing was driven by two numbers that are usually confused: the 42 l/min needed for the visible film, and the 6.8 m of head the return run imposes. Duty and standby pumps sit in a chamber adjacent to the reservoir.
Fabrication & finish
The rim is mirror-polished and the basin satin-finished, so the bright edge defines the water surface while the basin stays visually quiet beneath it. All wet-side welds were fully penetrated, ground flush and passivated.
Installation
Delivered in four quadrants with a bolted and sealed joint below the water line, then set on a levelling frame cast into the slab. Wind-spray was controlled by keeping the film height to 12 mm over the rim — enough to read, not enough to drift.
Outcome & value
Water consumption is held down by a level-control loop that only makes up what evaporates, and the variable-speed pump runs at 60 per cent in normal conditions. The building’s facilities team services it on a quarterly cycle.