The Petronas Towers

The Petronas Towers, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, were the world tallest buildings between 1998 and 2003, since the construction of the Taipei 101, in Taiwan, finished. Actually they are the 7^th tallest building and the tallest twin towers in the world with 452 meters, 88 floors and 350.000m² of total area. They became a symbol of the city.

The towers are at the middle of the comercial and financial district, that's way they are compound by offices, and evoke the traditional islamic art, remembering the mussulman past of Malaysia. 

Are joined by a double bridge between the  floors 41 and 42. This bridge, called Skybridge, is the hightest point accessible for the visitors and a way to evacuate the towers by a fire too.

The base is the other point in which the towers ara connected with a 6 floors building with shops, a research center, the Dewan Filharmonik Orchestra theater, an art gallery and a library.

The structure is based by a core and concrete pillars. Each tower is compound by 16 cylindrical columns of 2,4 meters diameter which are joined by concrete beams.

The design of the Skybridge was difficult due to the necessity of solve the possible diference of movements between each tower. That was solved joining the bridge and the towers by three support points inverted v-shaped.

At the beginning, the towers weren't thought to become the tallest buildings in the world because the initial design was 16 meters lower than the Sears Tower in Chicago. This idea arrived during the construction. The solution was to don't increase the number of floors and add a little dome and a pinnacle integrated in the tower structure.

This solution suposed that the Sears Tower remained as the highest last floor but the Petronas Towers get the “tallest structure title” until the construction of the Taipei 101.


The 78 lifts contain a number of safety features. It is possible to evacuate people from a lift stuck between floors by manually driving one of the adjacent lifts next to it and opening a panel in the wall. It is then possible for people in the stuck lift to walk between lift cars. During an evacuation of the buildings, only the shuttle lift is allowed to be used, as there are only doors at levels G/1 and levels 41/42; therefore should there be a fire in the lower half of the building, this enclosed shaft would remain unaffected. Firefighter lifts are also provided in case of emergency.