Briefly the world's tallest buildings, César Pelli’s monumental Malaysian towers horrified critics with their ambition and their unabashed symbolism. And these are precisely the qualities that have ensured their enduring success
Skyscrapers today are sleek and modernist, occasionally hazarding a gestural feature: the London Shard’s shards or the Shanghai World Financial Center’s trapezoidal hole. And, on the whole, these photogenic glass obelisks work. Sporadically, brave souls will risk symbolic or vernacular forms in the hope of creating a new Chrysler Building, usually with dubious results – witness the take-out boxes of Taipei 101 or the pagoda-lite of Shanghai’s Jin Mao tower. The lesson is clear: play safe.
Yet, across the world’s aspiring and actual megacities, there is one towering exception to this rule: Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers, officially the world’s tallest buildings from their completion in 1998 until 2004. Their architect, César Pelli, is treated with indifference, even scorn, by many in the profession, despite an intriguing CV that includes stints with Eero Saarinen and LA mall pioneer Victor Gruen. Pelli’s 1975 Pacific Design Center in Hollywood is superior early postmodernism – elemental forms wrapped in blue glass – while the 2004 International Finance Centre in Hong Kong shows his flair for polished towers in the modernist vein.
The extravagant 452m-tall bulk of the Petronas Towers delivers a visceral kick in the guts that today’s photogenic forms fail to provide
In the 1980s and 90s, however, Pelli ditched curtain walls in favour of the materials and mass of earlier skyscraper typologies. This high-risk embrace of granite, pyramids and domes could go wrong – witness the shiny stump of One Canada Square in London’s Docklands. But it could also go very right – standing under the extravagant 452m-tall bulk of the Petronas Towers delivers a visceral kick in the guts that today’s photogenic forms in flawless glass signally fail to provide.
Kuala Lumpur is not blessed with great buildings. Treatment of heritage structures has been pretty shabby, and the city’s architecture post-1957 was tentative – polite structures appropriate to the small capital of a fragile federal state. But, as its economy and population expanded in the 1970s, the city was quickly subsumed by ugly sprawl under the mantra of flexible planning. Finally, authoritarian prime minister Mathahir bin Mohamed kicked off a quest for “word-class city status” in the early 1990s, and Kuala Lumpur – scrabbling around at the bottom of the megacity league with around 1 million residents – pulled off its one crazy, unexpected coup.
The competition brief for the Petronas Towers demanded two tall structures with distinctive silhouettes that would symbolise Malaysia’s national religion, Islam, and its multiculturalism: “a place that people can identify as unique to Kuala Lumpur and Malaysia”. They had to be a ceremonial gateway between East and West and a centrepiece to a new “city within a city” – the 103-acre KLCC district built over the razed Selangor Turf Club. Unlike competing practices, Pelli met this challenge not by producing diverse sculptural forms, or one more homage to Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive, but by embracing the symbolism and symmetry of a classical gateway. He even included a slender skybridge 170m above the ground to form a lintel. The resulting void was a “figurative space” that, in Pelli’s view, provided “the key element in the composition” – he cited Lao Tse (“The reality of a vase is not in its clay walls but in the space they contain”) while quietly rejoicing in the avoidance of extra fire stairs.
Pelli concluded that, although “their qualities are not necessarily Malaysian … as they appear for the first time in Kuala Lumpur, they will be forever identified with the place”.
Other architects offered metaphors in place of representation; Pelli explored possibilities. The towers’ plan was based on the Rub el Hizb (a geometric pattern of two interlocking squares widespread across the Islamic world) with semicircles added in the resulting angles – the original 12-pointed proposal was swiftly dropped after Mathahir criticised it as “too Arabic”. Facades at lower levels included arcades to evoke Malaysian shop houses. The six receding segments of the towers, with their gently tilting walls, created an attenuation intended to recall South-east Asian temples and, more fantastically, local stalactites. Stainless steel and green glass ensured rich, fluctuating colours. The zigzagging profiles dispensed with the idioms of Western modernism, expressing instead a vigorous three-dimensionality, enhanced by projecting rings of teardrop louvres.
The decision to leapfrog Chicago’s Sears Tower as the world’s tallest building was last-minute – two 73m-tall pinnacles were affixed to the finished plans, among a host of belated changes that included the addition of a concert hall; a late site move to avoid difficult limestone ground; and the reorientation of the entire structure towards Mecca (much to Pelli’s displeasure). Pelli himself concluded of the towers that, although “their qualities are not necessarily Malaysian … as they appear for the first time in Kuala Lumpur, they will be forever identified with the place”.
Inevitably, they were met with disdain in the Western press. Critical bible The Architectural Review was particularly snotty, resuscitating Ian Nairn’s dusty “Outrage” moniker to slam these “massive erections” as a “grotesque Gotham City out-take”, “too absurd”, “a cocktail of superficialities”. In addition, the “poor folk” of Malaysia were patronised for their “essentially daft” pursuit of height, despite extravagant praise in the same issue for the 137 storeys of Melbourne’s doomed Grollo Towers, a world-beating proposal that would elevate the city to “the top league of competing world cities”. The Review concluded, “Surely Malaysia is too proud and sensible to take to the cocktail.”
Rarely has ridicule been so predictable, so irrelevant and so wrong.
Rarely has ridicule been so predictable, so irrelevant and so wrong. The towers have become a national symbol, embraced as a feat of engineering and aspiration. They are Malaysia’s largest tourist attraction, launching thousands of tatty souvenirs and t-shirts. The abandonment of nearby developments in the political and economic chaos of the late 1990s left them in solitary splendour and – with the crumbling of their Alhambra-inspired water courtyard and the encroachment of dusty car parks – the Petronas Towers now resemble a survival from a grander, more vaulting era: a Piranesian monument from the recent past. Modernist rivals may contribute to pretty skylines, but the Petronas Towers – unashamedly singular, unashamedly postmodern, and even a little crass – are a skyline all of their own. They are Malaysia.
First published in Icon 148, October 2015