Kuala Lumpur
— — twin towers, threaded with rain.
Not only on a wall.
“A city named for a muddy confluence, grown up around the place tin miners forded the river in the 1850s. The Petronas Twin Towers hold the centre, their stainless cladding catching whatever colour the sky is doing. The monsoon arrives most afternoons, brief and absolute, then leaves the air smelling of warm stone. Kampung Baru's wooden houses still keep their ground.
Kuala Lumpur, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Kuala Lumpur sits at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers in west-central Peninsular Malaysia, about 35 kilometres inland from the Strait of Malacca. The name translates roughly as muddy confluence, marking the river junction where Chinese tin miners established a settlement in 1857. The city became the capital of the Federated Malay States in 1896, of independent Malaysia in 1957, and was carved out as a separate federal territory in 1974. Putrajaya took over most administrative functions in 1999, but Parliament and the royal residence remain.
The Petronas Twin Towers, designed by Argentine-American architect César Pelli and completed in 1998, rise to 451.9 metres including their pinnacles. They held the title of tallest buildings in the world until Taipei 101 opened in 2004, and they remain the tallest twin towers ever built. The 58-metre Skybridge connects the towers at the forty-first and forty-second floors. The plan footprint is built on an eight-pointed Rub el Hizb star, an Islamic geometric motif that informed the entire structural grid.
The climate is equatorial: warm year-round, with daily highs near 32°C and humidity rarely dropping below 70 percent. Two monsoon shoulders, in April and October, bring the most consistent afternoon thunderstorms; the rain falls in short, hard bursts that clear inside an hour and leave the streets steaming. Batu Caves, the limestone Hindu shrine complex 13 kilometres north of the centre, holds a 42.7-metre statue of Lord Murugan at the foot of the 272 steps, painted gold in 2006 for the temple's 115th anniversary.