The construction of the PETRONAS Towers was a model of cooperation and efficiency and in some respects even more spectacular than the final result.
After a year of planning, the construction phase began in March 1993 with the excavation work for the foundation. The originally selected location was moved 60 meters due to the configuration of the bedrock exposed during the excavations. The excavation for the foundation went 30 meters below the soil surface, with work proceeding only after sunset and more than five hundred dump trucks full of soil being removed from the site each night.
For each of the two towers, more than one hundred foundation piles were poured next. Once the forms were in place, the slabs for the foundation of the two towers were poured in two continuous pours lasting about two and a half days each and using over 13,000 cubic feet of concrete for each of the two slabs. On top of these slabs a perimeter wall over a kilometer in total length and 21 meters tall was created to form the shell that would become the five-level underground car park.
The contract to construct the two towers was given to two different contracting companies and their friendly competition resulted in both remarkable speed and valuable cooperation as each team shared with the other information gained during the building process.
Tower One, which houses the PETRONAS headquarters, was built by a group led by the Japanese Hazama Corporation along with J.A Jones Construction of Charlotte North Carolina, and the Mitsubishi Corporation, MMC Engineering, and Ho Hop Construction of Japan.
Tower Two was constructed by the SKJ Consortium, composed of Samsung Engineering & Construction and Kuku Dong Engineering & Construction from Korea, Dragages and Bachy-Soletanche from Singapore and Syarikat Jasatera and First Nationwide Engineering Sdn Bhd from Malaysia.
Work on the tower structures started in April 1994 was completed by June 1996, with the first tenants moving into the buildings in 1998. The Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohammad presided over the opening ceremonies for the towers on Aug. 31, 1999, which coincided with the celebration of Malaysia’s Hari Kebangsaan holiday that marks the unification of the country and the establishment of the Malaya Federation in 1957.
Although many foreign firms participated in the construction process, a great deal of the work was done by local Malaysian companies. It is estimated that sixty percent of the materials used in the construction were obtained locally. All of the concrete and construction timber was Malaysian in origin as were many of the interior finishing materials including marble, ceramic tiles, and drywall materials. Many of the more complex features such as escalators, electrical fixtures and components and furniture were also supplied by Malaysian firms.
The functional structures of the PETRONAS Towers were designed by the structural engineers Thornton-Tomasetti, with headquarters in New York, and Ranill-Berskutu of Malaysia. The core structure of each of the towers is composed of a ring of sixteen cylindrical columns of high strength reinforced concrete. The columns vary in size from 2.4 meters in diameter at the lower areas to 1.2 meters in diameter at the top, and are placed at the outside corners and additional arcs of the eight pointed star shape that gives the buildings their classic Islamic shape. In a staging of six increments, the columns slope slightly inward as they rise, resulting in the tapered form of the final buildings. The columns are linked with a series of concrete core walls and ring beams and the architect César Pelli has described these movement-resistant and damper-free structures as a pair of “soft tubes”. There are actually two concentric pressurized cores in the structures, and the two cores unite at the 38th floor of each tower.
A significant choice of building materials was made early in the project, and it was decided to use reinforced concrete instead of the structural steel that is more common in other skyscrapers. This choice was made not only because local Malaysian contractors were more experienced building with concrete than with steel, but also because the cost of importing all the steel would have been prohibitive, whereas the concrete could be obtained locally. The final towers weigh more than twice what they would have had steel been used, but it was additionally felt that the use of concrete would more effectively dampen sway in windy conditions and reduce vibrations within the towers.
The structural plan liberates additional floor space inside the towers by locating the mechanical services for the towers in two “bustles” that are 43 story tall buildings located immediately adjacent to the towers. After completion, the exteriors of the two concrete “soft tubes” were clad in stainless steel and glass with a design that originated in the classic geometric patterns of ancient Islamic art. The foundations for the structures are huge concrete cores and are considered the deepest building foundations in the world.
The two 73-meter tall pinnacle structures of the towers were, like the towers, constructed by two different contractors. One of the pinnacles was fabricated in Japan and the other in Korea. Built of structural steel and then disassembled and shipped to Kuala Lumpur, the pinnacles were reassembled and mounted atop the towers in yet another delicate operation that required several months of practice before the final installation. The two pinnacles are clad in brushed stainless steel.
Each tower used 11,000 tons of reinforcement steel, 2,825,120 cubic feet of high-strength concrete, almost 7,500 tons of structural steel beams and 830,000 square feet of glass windows.
In this article, you will find the various statistical details related to the PETRONAS Towers:
• Height: 452 meters above street level
• Skybridge Length: 58.4 meters
• Skybridge Structure Height: 2+ stories (9 meters) tall
• Skybridge Location Height: 170 meters above street level
• Pinnacle Heights: 1 per tower, 73.5 meters tall each
• Pinnacle Weights: 1 per tower, 176 tons each
• Office Story Height: 4.0 meters
• Office Floor to Ceiling Heights: 2.65meters
• Underground Diaphragm Wall: 1.1 km in length, 80 cm thick
• Foundation Barrettes: 208 piles, 2.8 x1.2 meters in diameter
• Foundation Barrette Lengths: 40 to 115 meters in length
• Carpark Foundation Columns: 1,000 piles 1 meter in diameter, 29 meters in length
• Carpark Slab: 90 cm thick, 18,752 square feet
• Tower Support Rafts: two concrete platforms, 4.5 meters thick
• Support Raft Weights: two, weighing 32,500 tons each
• Access Roads: 2.5 kilometers in total length
• Surface Drainage System: 4 kilometers in length
• Towers Interior Volume: 395,000 square meters total
• Office Floorplates Size (gross): 2623 to 935 square meters
• Office Floorplates Size (net): 1,970 to 591 square meters
• Tower Usable Space Ratio: 76 percent
• Office Space per Floor: 1,300 to 2,043 square meters
• Carpark Depth: 5 stories of parking facilities
• Additional Basement Depth: 4 stories of Basement Concourse and Mezzanine
• Office Floors: 88
• Lobby Height: 2 stories
• Bustle Buildings: two, 44 stories each
• Sky Lobby Height: 2 stories, at levels 41 and 42
• Highest Occupied Floor: Executive Office, Floor 86, 361 meters above street
• Executive Office Size: 494.3 square meters
• Concrete Cores Dimensions: 73 x 73 meters
• Concrete in Towers Volume: 160,000 cubic meters
• Concrete Used Weight: 13 ,200 tons per tower
• Concrete Reinforcement Steel: 10,955 tons
• Foundation Concrete Used: 13,200 cubic meters
• Structural Steel: 7,500 tons
• Total Steel Used: 36, 910 cubic meters
• Stainless Steel Cladding: 85,000 square meters
• Window Glass: 78,000 square meters
• Doors: 1,800
• Stairs: 765 flights
• Escalators: 10 in each tower
• Elevators: 29, with double Decker cabins
• Total Construction Area: 395,000 square meters
• Total Project Area: 14.5 acres
• Weight Per Tower: 300,000 tones
• Usable Tower Space: 213,750 square meters per tower
• Total Office Space: 3,000,000 square meters
• Total Jobs in Towers: 10,000
• Annex Space in Two Bustles: 186,000 square meters
• Construction Costs: 2.5 billion U.S.dollars
• Ground Floor Area: 32,929 square meters
• Total Combined Floor Area: 790,000 square meters
• KLCC Project: 100 acres, 40 commercial, 60 public
The design models that inspired the creation of the PETRONAS Towers were taken from the many historical architecture styles rooted in Malaysian culture. Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic thoughts dominated the history of Malaysia with an additional European influence. The PETRONAS Towers reflect portions of all these models, and the towers that exist today owe a great deal of their power to the judicious combination of cultural influences in their design.
The earliest influences arrived from old Hindu and Buddhist temples. Although Hinduism flowered earlier, the growth of these two religions are both intertwined in the early history of Malaysia, and their architectures provide ample examples of the styles consulted in the designing of the PETRONAS Towers.
The Hindu Prambanan temple complex on the island of Java is typical of the tall and pointed forms of Hindu temple architecture. The Shiva Temple, built on the site around 850, bears a certain resemblance to the PETRONAS Towers, as both reach high into the sky in a series of staggered steps capped by decorative spires. The spires that appear on the Hindu temples at Angkor Wat in Cambodia were built in the twelfth century and are quite similar to the slightly rounded pinnacles on top of the PETRONAS Towers. The flavor of the ancient Hindu Dravidian architecture style is also present in the PETRONAS Towers as Dravidian towers often consisted of progressively smaller stories of pavilions placed one atop another.
Even the squat Great Stupa built by Ashoka the Great in 250 BC at Sanchi, India bears a family resemblance to the PETRONAS Towers due to the rising layers of concentric rings. The stupa building form was common in Buddhist religious architecture and later evolved in the Pagoda form that came to dominate Asian architecture. The PETRONAS Towers in some ways resemble tall stylized pagodas.
The classic motifs of Islamic architecture like orderly repetition, radiating structures and rhythmic patterns, and organized columns and alternating niches have also been a significant feature in the towers. Examples of these motifs abound in the PETRONAS Towers, as the basic superstructure of the towers includes a series of columns nestled in the niches of the eight pointed star that forms the base of each tower. The orderly repetition of the concentric glass and steel rings that cover the exterior of the PETRONAS Towers is also in keeping with Islamic architectural traditions. Islamic architecture grew largely from Persian styles and may be considered a further evolution of Persian architecture. The tapered pillars of Persian-style mosques superseded Hindu architecture in most of southern Asia 1,000 years ago. Islamic mosques are also famous for their minarets, which are often described as a gate between heaven and earth, a description that seems quite appropriate when applied to the PETRONAS Towers. The PETRONAS Towers feature a bit of Islamic arabesque in their geometric representation of living creatures as the towers in some ways resemble a pair of giant plant forms rising from the ground. Comparing the Sultan Ahmed Mosque built by the Ottoman Ahmed I in 1616 in Istanbul with the PETRONAS Towers built in Kuala Lumpur in 1998, we can see there are many familiar similarities.
The stylistic contributors to the design for the towers were many, and even echoes of the Eiffel tower can be noted. But the design is not merely a catch-all of all previous architectural styles of the world. The angularity of western architecture was rejected, but the western habit of innovation was heartily embraced. The flat planar focus of European architecture was not used, but the European habit of multiculturalism was adopted enthusiastically.
The design of the PETRONAS Towers can be seen as both a two-way window and a two-way mirror, looking inside and out of Malaysia at the same time, focusing modern economics and innovative technology from around the globe into Malaysia while reflecting Malaysia’s own culture back out into the world.
