The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
César Pelli · a pair of office towers joined by a skybridge, scored as one work: Tower 1 and Tower 2, the two-storey skybridge between them, the smaller circular annex on each tower’s flank, the pinnacles and the lobbies · reinforced concrete, a central core and a perimeter ring of large round columns tied by a ring beam at each floor, in high-strength concrete; a curtain wall of glass in horizontal bands with stainless steel sunshades and spandrels · each tower an eight-pointed star in plan, two squares turned on one another with a curved lobe in each inner angle, stepping back in setbacks to a tapered crown, a ringed drum and a needle pinnacle, 88 storeys and 451.9 m to the tip; the skybridge at levels 41 and 42, about 170 m up and about 58 m long, carried on a hinged inverted V of legs · Kuala Lumpur City Centre, on the former ground of the Selangor Turf Club, over the Suria KLCC shopping centre · completed 1998, officially opened 1999 · César Pelli, of Cesar Pelli & Associates, with Thornton Tomasetti as structural engineers, for Petronas through KLCC Berhad; Tower 1 built by a consortium led by Hazama Corporation, Tower 2 by one led by Samsung C&T · as it stands, complete as designed, nothing lost, replaced or rebuilt; in office use since completion, the skybridge and an upper observation level open to visitors
Mode
Corporate headquarters as national emblem; a height record taken by a pair of towers made one figure
Mythos
The gate: two pillars and the way between them, the bridge a threshold in the sky; the tower as axis joining earth and heaven, its pinnacle drawn upward as a needle; the star of two squares, a figure of order in Islamic geometry, made the plan
Phase
Designed by César Pelli after an invited competition; built by two rival consortia in the years of the Asian financial crisis of 1997; completed 1998, officially opened 1999; the tallest buildings in the world from 1998 until Taipei 101 in 2004; in office use since
Presentation
Two mirrored towers of 88 storeys on an eight-pointed star plan, in reinforced concrete under banded glass and stainless steel, stepping to tapered crowns and needle pinnacles at 451.9 m; a two-storey skybridge at levels 41 and 42 on hinged legs
Register
Exhilaration without dread; silver, faceted and upright, gathered in the upper body and the silhouette, and recurring across the city at night
Scale
A national oil company and the state behind it; a city given a new centre and a sign; a race for height between continents
Governing Proposition
A national oil company, under a government that wanted a building of Malaysian and Islamic identity, raises its headquarters on the old racecourse of Kuala Lumpur and stakes it on the height record. The wager of the building is that the tallest tower, the West’s chief sign of capital, can be taken in concrete rather than steel, planned on a star of Islamic geometry rather than on the grid, and doubled: two shafts made one figure by a bridge between them, so that the record is held by a gate and the sky between the towers becomes its doorway.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The towers stand in the centre of Kuala Lumpur on ground that was the racecourse of the Selangor Turf Club, the colonial city’s turf, cleared for a new commercial centre, Kuala Lumpur City Centre. The client was Petronas, the Malaysian national oil company, acting through KLCC Berhad, and behind the client stood the government of Mahathir Mohamad, whose wish for a building of Malaysian and Islamic identity is documented in substance. The headquarters of the oil company was to be the sign of the nation.
The design went to César Pelli, of Cesar Pelli & Associates in New Haven, who won it in an invited competition. Pelli came to the commission with a manner already made. In American towers of the 1980s, the Norwest Center in Minneapolis, now the Wells Fargo Center, among them, he had revived the setback tower of New York in the 1920s and 1930s, the shaft that steps back as it rises and closes in a crown. The structural engineers were Thornton Tomasetti, working with a Malaysian partner.
The project was carried in the years before the Asian financial crisis of 1997, and its ambition was stated in height. Since the early years of the twentieth century the tallest building in the world had stood in the United States, and the tallest tower was the West’s chief sign of capital. A postcolonial state with a Muslim majority set out to take that sign, build it in its own material and dress it in its own geometry, and to raise it as the headquarters of the company whose oil paid for it.
Movement II
Every floor of each tower is drawn on one figure: two squares turned forty-five degrees on one another, making an eight-pointed star, the motif known in Islamic geometry as the Rub el Hizb. Into each inner angle between the points a circular arc is set, so that the perimeter alternates eight points and eight curved lobes. The figure does not stay on the surface. It is the footprint of the floor from the lobby to the crown, and the sign of the plan is the structure’s own outline.
In elevation the shaft steps back in a series of setbacks and closes in a tapered crown, a ringed drum and a needle pinnacle. The stepping is the American setback tower that Pelli had revived; here the setbacks follow the narrowing core and the load of the columns, and the rings of the crown repeat the circles of the plan. The skin is a curtain wall of glass in horizontal bands with stainless steel sunshades and spandrels, and because the plan folds at every point and lobe the shafts read as fluted and faceted, silver, taking the tropical light differently at every hour.
There are two towers, mirror images on one axis, and each carries on its flank a smaller circular annex. The pair is the work. Neither tower alone is the design: the plan, the space between the towers and the bridge across it were drawn as one figure. A plain square plan and two separate towers would serve the offices nearly as well; what they could not do is make the figure by which the city and the nation are known. At their feet the Suria KLCC shopping centre forms a podium between and around the bases, and the towers meet the ground through it.
Movement III
The supertall of the twentieth century was a steel type. The Petronas Towers are reinforced concrete: a central core and a perimeter ring of large cylindrical columns, tied by a ring beam at each floor, in high-strength concrete. The choice was economic and national at once. Malaysia had a concrete industry and would have had to import steel, so the record was taken in the material the country made. The ring of columns is what makes the round lobes of the plan, and there purpose and structure meet.
The towers were built by two rival consortia, Tower 1 by one led by Hazama Corporation of Japan and Tower 2 by one led by Samsung C&T of Korea. Two foreign contractors were set against each other on a national prestige project, and the two shafts were brought to one finish. Completed in 1998 and officially opened in 1999, the towers rise 88 storeys and 451.9 m to the tips of their pinnacles.
The making is surest in the body of the shafts and in the bridge. The setback crown and the pinnacles are handled with less sureness, and the junction of shaft and shopping centre at the ground is uncertain: the towers rise out of a mall, and another law, the mall’s, governs there. Inside, the office floors are lived much as in any tower of the decade, round a core, behind banded glass. The star gives the floors points and lobes; it does not give them a different way of working, and the points make awkward corners for offices.
Movement IV
Between the towers, at levels 41 and 42, about 170 m above the ground, runs the skybridge, two storeys high and about 58 m long. It is carried from below on a two-hinged inverted V of legs that bear on the towers lower down, and it is not fixed rigidly at its ends, so that each tower may sway on its own. Two shafts that move in the wind are joined by a threshold that holds while they move apart and together. It is the building’s one built idea of relation, and it is also an escape route from one tower to the other.
The bridge turns size into figure. Without it the towers are two tall buildings; with it they are two pillars and the way between them, and the void between the shafts acquires a scale. The gate is an old figure, the twin pillars before a door, the portal of a city, and here it is built into the composition and bears load: the pair exists to frame the void, and the bridge makes the void a threshold in the sky. Seen from the park or along the approach roads, the thin span at mid-height is where the composition resolves.
What the gate frames is the question it leaves open. No sacred or civic way passes through it; beneath the bridge lies the roof of the shopping centre, and beyond it the park. The star of two squares, a figure of order in Islamic geometry, is the plan of every floor, but the building does not enact a cosmology: no orientation, no sacred use, no sequence of light is governed by it. The meaning of the pair is fixed less by the work than by its reception, as the sign of a city and a state.
Movement V
In 1998 the towers became the tallest buildings in the world, the first holders of the title outside the United States since the early years of the twentieth century. The record rested on the pinnacles, which rose above the roof of the Sears Tower in Chicago, while the Sears Tower kept the higher occupied floor and the higher roof; the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat then divided its categories of height. The record was held until Taipei 101 in 2004. The towers remain the tallest pair of towers in the world.
The race went where they had sent it, to Asia and the Gulf: to Taipei 101, the towers of Shanghai and the Burj Khalifa, which stands on a concrete core and a plan drawn from regional geometry; and the national or civic identity tower became a type across Asia. The turn was shared. The Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai made the same regional turn independently, the race was driven by capital more than by any one building, and the twin tower joined by a bridge has had few direct descendants.
Twenty-eight years on, the towers stand complete as designed, with nothing lost, replaced or rebuilt: the pair, the plan, the setbacks, the bridge and the pinnacles as built, the stainless steel and glass keeping their face in a tropical climate. They have been offices since completion, with the client’s headquarters still in them; the bridge and an upper observation level are open to paying visitors in great numbers, and at night the lit towers recur across the city as its sign. Their survival is also that of the economy that raised them, oil and the state’s project, which has not yet been tested by its end.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on purpose, structure and site. The purpose is a headquarters for a national oil company and a sign for a nation, and the sign is not assembled: plan, setbacks, crown and pinnacle are one figure, and the figure is the brief. Several parts pass the subtractive test because purpose and structure meet in them: the ring of concrete columns makes the round lobes, the setbacks follow the narrowing core and the load of the columns, and the skybridge is both the gate of the composition and an escape route between the towers. What resists: the second tower is compelled by the image of the gate more than by any programme; the star’s points make awkward corners for offices; and the pinnacles exist chiefly for the record.
Score: 7.6 / 10
What can be stated, and holds: at the end of the twentieth century a postcolonial state with a Muslim majority claimed the West’s chief symbol of capital, the tallest tower, and dressed it in its own geometry; the record left North America for Asia, and the building said so in a figure anyone could read. It discloses how a developmental state, financed by oil and led from the top, makes modernity national: the pair rises on the colonial city’s racecourse, over a shopping centre, under the state oil company’s name. That is a disclosure of power, made in space. Held well below the gate: the building asserts more than it reveals, and oil, the state’s hand and the mall at its feet are carried rather than brought into the open.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Height and frequency are both real. The pair seen from the park or along the approach roads, two fluted silver shafts rising together, is an elevation of grandeur. The bridge, a thin span between them at mid-height, turns size into figure: it gives the void between the towers a scale and makes the sky a doorway. At night the lit towers recur across the city as its sign, and by day the faceted skin takes the tropical light differently at every hour. The register is exhilaration without dread. It falls within: the office floors are offices and the base is lost in the mall, so that the sublime is gathered in the upper body and the silhouette.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Here the building does more than evoke. The gate, two pillars and the way between them, is built into the composition and bears load: the pair exists to frame a void, and the bridge makes the void a threshold in the sky. The twin pillars before a door, the portal of a city and the tower as axis joining earth and heaven are present in plan and section, not in ornament. The star of two squares, a figure of order in Islamic geometry, is the plan of every floor, so that the sign is structure. Held below the gate: the gate opens on nothing in particular, no sacred or civic way passing through it, only the roof of a mall; and the star is a motif made plan, not a cosmology the building enacts.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance: the setback tower of New York in the 1920s and 1930s, which Pelli had already revived in his American towers of the 1980s, the Norwest Center in Minneapolis, now the Wells Fargo Center, among them; and the late modern glass office shaft. The departure: the record taken in reinforced concrete, not steel; a plan drawn from Islamic geometry rather than from the grid, so that a regional ornament becomes the whole floor; the tall building made a pair joined by a bridge. The stake was real: a national prestige project before the Asian financial crisis of 1997, a record staked on a concrete system, two foreign contractors set against each other. Held below the gate because the turn lies within Pelli’s own manner, and the setback silhouette is a revival.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Does the form change how its purpose is lived? For the city and the nation, yes: the pair is how Kuala Lumpur is known and how Malaysia presented itself, and the gate figure is unthinkable as a single tower. For those who work inside, less: the floors are lived much as in any office tower of the decade, round a core, behind banded glass, the star giving the plan points and lobes but not a different way of working. The bridge is the one element lived differently, as passage and as escape between two buildings at height. Substitute a square plan and two separate towers, and the offices lose almost nothing; the city loses its sign. The axis meets the Universal Minimum exactly.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Evidence over promise, across twenty-eight years. The building has yielded some return: to structural engineering, as a case of the high-strength concrete supertall and of the free bridge between swaying towers; to the history of the height race and its measures, since the dispute over its pinnacles changed how height is counted; to the architectural history of postcolonial Southeast Asia, as the emblem of Mahathir’s Malaysia and of the national tower; and to film and the popular image. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve but one: the return is mostly to the building’s circumstances, the race, the state and the oil, rather than to new knowledge of the work, and once the plan and the pair are grasped the building holds few further discoveries. The span is short.
Score: 7.3 / 10
The field is the tall building of its decade in Asia and the world, and the towers have stood in view since 1998, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the record taken out of North America for the first time since the early twentieth century; concrete made a material of the supertall; a regional identity carried in the plan rather than in applied ornament. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real, wide and shared. The race moved to Asia and the Gulf, to Taipei 101, the towers of Shanghai and the Burj Khalifa, the last on a concrete core and a plan drawn from regional geometry; the identity tower became a type across Asia; the counting of height was revised in its wake. Bounded: the Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai made the same regional turn independently, the race was driven by capital more than by this building, and the bridged pair has had few descendants.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over a span of twenty-eight years, short of the half-century by which survival is best judged. The form survives whole: pair, plan, setbacks, bridge and pinnacles stand as built, nothing lost or remade. The use survives unbroken: offices since completion, the client’s headquarters still in them, the bridge and an upper level open to visitors in great numbers. The fabric has held in a tropical climate for nearly three decades, stainless steel and glass keeping their face, and no structural trouble is known. Presence is the widest a building of its age can have, a national emblem known worldwide. High for its span, and short of the gate because the span is short and because its survival is also that of a prestige economy, oil and the state’s project, not yet tested by its end.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is of the first rank in the structure, and it bears load in the bridge: a record height carried in high-strength reinforced concrete, a core and a ring of round columns tied by ring beams, when the supertall was a steel type; the bridge set on hinged legs and left free at its ends, so that two swaying towers are joined without being tied together; two shafts built by rival contractors to one finish. The cladding is detailed with care, stainless sunshades and banded glass giving the shafts their fluted, faceted surface. The costs: the setback crown and the pinnacles are handled with less sureness than the body, the junction of shaft and mall at the ground is uncertain, and the interiors bear no weight in the work.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the eight-pointed star of the floor plan and the hinged legs of the skybridge, the sign of the plan and the mechanism of the bridge. One law reaches both more often than not. A geometry of rotated squares and circles governs the plan, the stepping of the setbacks, the round columns, and the drums and rings of the crown and pinnacle; and the two towers, mirror images on one axis, obey the law of the pair, which the bridge enacts. The range is moderate, one type, one material system, one figure doubled, and narrowness is not coherence. What bends the law: the bridge’s inverted V speaks engineering’s grammar, not the plan’s; the annexes sit beside the shafts as appendages; and at the base the shopping centre’s law governs.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Orders held: the state, which wanted the building as its sign; commerce and the oil economy, which paid for it and whose company it houses; the nation and its claim on modernity; the sacred, present as the geometry of Islam made plan, though as identity more than as worship; the city, as skyline and as a new centre on the old racecourse; and the world beyond, in the race with America and in the foreign makers and contractors. The one figure of the gate integrates them; they are not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the household, labour except as the record of a building race, the body, individual consciousness, the natural order, left to the park, and death. An office pair holds a state’s confidence at one moment, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable and The Made at 8.4, then The Sublime at 8.3. A form that stands whole after twenty-eight years, in unbroken use and with the widest presence a building of its age can have; a record height carried in high-strength concrete, and a bridge left free at its ends so that two swaying towers are joined without being tied; and an elevation of grandeur in the pair and the span between them, gathered in the upper body and the silhouette.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0, then The Bottomless Well at 7.3 and The Living Form at 7.5. The state, the oil economy, the nation, the sacred as identity, the city and the world are held in the one figure of the gate, while the household, labour, the body, consciousness, the natural order and death are absent; the return over twenty-eight years is mostly to the building’s circumstances rather than to the work; and the form changes how the city and the nation live with the building far more than how its offices are lived. With The Unconcealment and The Inevitable at 7.6 and The Swerve at 7.7, these hold the work below Tier IV: a serious and lasting achievement that asserts more than it reveals and carries a type to a record without redefining the type. The Chrysler Building (8.1), the setback tower Pelli revived, stands three tenths higher on its survival over nearly a century, a wider swerve and a deeper yield, though the gate here is the more fully built myth and the law reaches further into the structure; the Seagram Building (8.5) stands higher on every axis, for it reorganised the office tower, where the Petronas Towers carried a type to a record.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.2, The Living Form at 7.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Imperishable at 8.4 falls a tenth short of the bar of 8.5, The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 five tenths short, The Swerve at 7.7 eight tenths short and The Unconcealment at 7.6 nine tenths short. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Bottomless Well, 7.3, below 7.5; The Living Form meets it exactly at 7.5, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.8, from a sum of 94.0, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the towers as they stand in 2026 and of their plan, section, structure and reception. No plan, image or written source was consulted; the office floors are not known from inside, and the lobbies are known from description and image only. The work scored is the two towers as one work: Petronas Tower 1 and Petronas Tower 2, the two-storey skybridge that joins them, the smaller circular annex on each tower’s flank, the pinnacles and the lobbies, read as a single paired composition. The Suria KLCC shopping centre that forms the podium between and around the bases, the Dewan Filharmonik Petronas concert hall and the gallery within it, KLCC Park in front, the wider Kuala Lumpur City Centre development, the tenants, the lighting schemes and the visitors’ programme are context and are neither credited nor charged; where the towers meet the ground, the podium is named as the condition they stand on. What now stands is what was built: the towers are complete as designed, and no loss, replacement, rebuilding or later addition to them is known. The design is César Pelli’s, of Cesar Pelli & Associates, New Haven, with Thornton Tomasetti and a Malaysian partner as structural engineers, for Petronas through KLCC Berhad; Tower 1 was built by a consortium led by Hazama Corporation and Tower 2 by one led by Samsung C&T. Collaboration is not charged. Nothing is quoted: no statement of Pelli’s or of Mahathir Mohamad’s is given in exact words, and the government’s wish for a building of Malaysian and Islamic identity is given in substance only. Facts that could not be verified, among them the year of the competition, the name of the Malaysian engineering partner, the builder of the skybridge, the number of storeys in the annexes, the number of setbacks, the number of columns in each ring and the strength of the concrete, the level at which the bridge’s legs bear, the foundations and any change in the towers’ position on the site, the designer of the park, the finish of the lobbies and their floors, the date and designers of the Jin Mao Tower, the total floor area, the number of lifts and of cladding panels, the height of the pinnacles, the days of topping out and opening, and the cost, are not given.