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The Petronas Towers
Height: 1,483 ft (452 meters)
On April 15, 1996, the Council on Tall Buildings named the Petronas Towers the
tallest in the world, passing the torch to a new continent. Although the
project's developers, a consortium of private investors in association with the
Malaysian government and Petronas, the national oil company, had not originally
set out to surpass Chicago's Sears Tower, they did aspire to construct a
monument announcing Kuala Lumpur's prominence as a commercial and cultural
capital. In the design of American architect Cesar Pelli they found a winning
scheme--twin towers of elegant proportions with a slenderness ratio (height to
width) of 9.4--that would capture not only the title but the public imagination.
Pelli's design answered the developer's call to express the ìculture and heritage of
Malaysiaî by evoking Islamic arabesques and employing repetitive geometries
characteristic of Muslim architecture. In plan, an 8-point star formed by
intersecting squares is an obvious reference to Islamic design; curved and
pointed bays create a scalloped facade that suggests temple towers. The
identical towers are linked by a bridge at the 41st floor, creating a dramatic
gateway to the city.
The structure is high-strength concrete, a material familiar to Asian contractors
and twice as effective as steel in sway reduction. Supported by 75-by-75-foot
concrete cores and an outer ring of widely-spaced super columns, the towers
showcase a sophisticated structural system that accommodates its slender profile
and provides from 14,000 to 22,000 square feet of column-free office space per
floor.
Other features include a curtain wall of glass and stainless steel sun shades to
diffuse the intense equatorial light; a double-decker elevator system with a sky
lobby transfer point on the 41st floor to accommodate the thousands of people
who use the complex daily; and a mixed-use base featuring a concert hall and
shopping center enveloped by nearly seventy acres of public parks and plazas.
In both engineering and design, the Petronas Towers succeed at acknowledging
Malaysia's past and future, embracing the country's heritage while proclaiming
its modernization. The end result, says Pelli, is a monument that is not
specifically Malaysian, but will forever be identified with Kuala Lumpur.
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