Tessera Tower
An 82-storey tower that shades itself.
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia · 2016–2022
Tessera Tower rises 388.5 metres over a covered public plaza in Kuala Lumpur. Its 9,240 façade panels are each set at their own angle to the equatorial sun, so the tower shades itself and the glass behind it stays cool.
A skin that reads the sun
On the equator the sun climbs almost vertically, and a flat glass skin turns a tower into a heat trap. We modelled the sun’s path across every face for a full year and let each triangular panel find its own angle: steep on the east and west, nearly flat on the north and south. The panels are glazed ceramic, light enough to bounce heat and pale enough to glow at dusk. Behind them the cooling load is 38 percent below a conventional glass tower of the same size.
Structure as public space
The diagrid that carries the façade also carries the building and frees the floors from internal columns. At level 78 a 680-tonne tuned mass damper settles the tower in monsoon winds. We put it on show: the sky park wraps around the damper’s glass room, and visitors can watch it move.
Everyone in the city can see the top of a tower. We wanted everyone to be able to reach it.
Below the plaza
Six basement levels reach 32 metres below the plaza, and beneath them the tower stands on 2.5-metre bored piles reaching 65 metres into weathered sedimentary rock. The plaza above collects rainwater for the sky park’s irrigation and the cooling towers, and its canopy keeps the ground floor open to the street in every monsoon.
Images: Instinctual Group.
