Part 9, Kuala Lumpur and the Petronas Towers

Date: 4/6/2017 to 4/8/2017.  Highs in the low 90s, lows in the mid 70s.

Photo 3062, approaching Kuala Lumpur by air at night

We found Kuala Lumpur (“KL”) to be a perfectly lovely place where there was a very diverse mix of cultures rubbing shoulders in harmony, from eyes-only burkahs to let-it-all-hang-out Western dress. It was a British colony at one time, so they drive on the left, and almost everyone speaks English.

Photo 3061, the view of the towers at night

The reason we came to Kuala Lumpur was to see the Petronas Towers, which were the tallest buildings in the world from 1998-2004, when the Taipei 101 took the crown. Everyone finds a way to hang onto their bragging rights though, and KL’s is that the Petronas Towers are the tallest TWIN towers in the world. The twin towers check in at 1,483′ (452m), 88 stories, which puts them at #12 in the current pantheon of tall buildings, with the Burj Khalifa (Dubai, 2,717′) in the current #1 position. What a difference 13 years can make!

Incidentally, “Petronas” stands for Petroliam Nasional Berhad, which is an oil and gas company wholly owned by the Malaysian government.  Petronas was ranked as #75 on the Fortune 500 as of 2013 — also the 12th most profitable in the world, and the most profitable in Asia.  This undoubtedly has something to do with why KL looks so rich.

So why go to visit twin buildings that used to be the tallest in the world (1998-2004), but are no more?  Here are my reasons:

• The Petronas Towers stick in my memory as the buildings that broke the American monopoly on “tallest in the world” that dated from 1901 to 1998.  In 1998 the Petronas Towers passed the Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower) in Chicago as the world’s tallest.
• The Petronas Towers became icons in their era at least in part because of their unusual architectural beauty.  They got a lot of press at the time, and had a prominent role in the 1999 Sean Connery/Catherine Zeta-Jones movie “Entrapment”

As you might guess, the matter of measuring the height of a building to determine which is the tallest in the world has a history of controversy … and it’s not hard to see why. Do you measure to the roof, or to the top of the highest occupied floor, or to the top of a spire or antenna on top? The matter of scoring the world’s tallest buildings has become widely accepted as done by an organization called the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (or CTBUH). How these controversies were resolved over the years I don’t pretend to know, but I can tell you what the criteria are today.

There are three criteria that the CTBUH uses for establishing the tallest. A fourth criteria (height to top of roof) was dropped in 2009 due to the complexity of modern [skyscraper] roof designs making it difficult to determine what to measure to. The three criteria:

1. Height to architectural top, which includes spires, but not antennae.
2. Height to the floor level of the highest occupied floor
3. Height to tip: which includes to the top of antennae, flagpoles or technical equipment.

When we got to Kuala Lumpur, we were pleased to learn that our hotel gave us a front row seat to the Twin Towers, and with a bonus of a very nice large city park, KLCC or Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park, at our feet between us and the towers, which softened up the cityscape and embellished the view even more. KLCC Park has a jogging trail, walking paths, waterfalls, and a fountain that puts on a water show during the day, done in color at night. What a collection of visual delights!

Photo 0371, the daytime view of Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park & Petronas Towers

The plan view of the towers consists of a recurring Muslim design: super-imposed squares offset 45 degrees, with rounded connections filling the inside corners.

Photo 0453, Exterior detailing of the Petronas Towers from the skybridge

As I mentioned, the Petronas Towers played a supporting role the 1999 heist movie “Entrapment”, in which use the skybridge between the two towers for an escape scene. I can’t resist mentioning that Sean Connery is a McLean (his mother), and also that the Maclean (Scottish spelling) clan castle, Duart Castle on the Isle of Mull in Scotland, was also featured in “Entrapment”. It seems, I just talked myself into going back to see the movie again!

Photo 0442, Skybridge struts, looking down

My only complaint about Kuala Lumpur was the heat and humidity. At 3 degrees north latitude, its climate changes very little throughout the year: 90F and 90% humidity … it’s your basic steambath. But all the buildings and cars are air-conditioned, so if you are weather wimps like us Seattleites, you can duck back in for some A/C protection when it gets to be too much.

Kuala Lumpur has the pulse of a very thriving place. There is new high-rise construction going on all over the place, and even a new skyscraper just now “coming out of the ground” on one side of KLCC Park that will eventually block the view in one direction of the mountains outside of town.

We really enjoyed our time in Kuala Lumpur – those breakfast buffets at our hotel were fantastic, and we both found the design of the Petronas Towers to be the most architecturally pleasing of the skyscrapers we have visited so far. And the tour groups for the building are very small and relaxed which made it easy to get all the photos we wanted.

Photo 3078, Cheryl in KLCC Park at night with colored lights

We had some angst about seeing our KL time come to an end. India and the Taj Mahal were our next stop, and we had read quite a bit about the Indian currency crisis of late 2016, and didn’t know how difficult conditions would be there.

A tip of the hat to Wikipedia for supporting details.