Petronas Towers
— — two towers that meet in the middle of the sky.
Not only on a wall.
“The Petronas Towers rise 1,483 feet above Kuala Lumpur, twin stainless-steel spires joined at the 41st and 42nd floors by a sky bridge that flexes with the wind. César Pelli drew them on an eight-pointed Islamic star, two interlocking squares rotated together. They opened in 1998 and held the title of world's tallest building for six years, the only twin towers ever to do so. At night the steel cladding goes silver-blue under the lights of KLCC Park. The fountain at the base runs every hour after sunset. from the studio
Petronas Towers, 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.
The Petronas Towers stand in the Kuala Lumpur City Centre district, on the site of the former Selangor Turf Club racetrack. At 451.9 metres (1,483 feet) to the spire, the twin towers were the tallest buildings in the world from their completion in 1998 until Taipei 101 in 2004. They remain the tallest twin towers on Earth. Each tower has 88 floors, joined at the 41st and 42nd by a 58-metre double-decker sky bridge. Tower One houses Petronas, the Malaysian state oil company that commissioned the project. Tower Two is leased to multinational tenants including Bloomberg, Huawei, and Al Jazeera.
César Pelli designed the towers on an eight-pointed star — two interlocking squares with arc infills — drawn from Islamic geometric tradition. The plan is the same on every floor, taken in plan view from the eighth-point rosettes common to Selangor mosques. The structure is reinforced concrete with a stainless-steel and glass cladding system. Construction took six years, with the two towers built by separate joint ventures racing in parallel — Hazama-led on Tower One, Samsung-led on Tower Two — to keep the schedule. Foundations go 120 metres deep, the deepest in the world at the time.
The towers sit in the KLCC district, directly above the KLCC LRT station on the Kelana Jaya Line. Sky bridge and observation deck tickets sell out daily and are best booked through the official Petronas Twin Towers website at least a week ahead; the combined visit lasts about 45 minutes and runs RM 98 for adult international visitors. The Suria KLCC mall fills the podium floors. KLCC Park, designed by Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, covers fifty acres at the base; the Lake Symphony fountain runs hourly from 8 p.m. with music and lights.