petronas twin tower
The Petronas Twin Towers (also known as the Petronas Towers or just Twin Towers), in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia are twin towers
and were the world's tallest buildings, before being surpassed by Taipei 101.
However, the towers are still the tallest twin buildings in the world.
They were the world's tallest buildings from 1998 to 2004 if measured from the level of the main entrance to the structural top,
the original height reference used by the US-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat from 1969
(three additional height categories were introduced as the tower neared completion in 1996)
The Petronas Twin Towers were the tallest buildings in the world until Taipei 101,
as measured to the top of their structural components (spires, but not antennas), took over the record.
Spires are considered integral parts of the architectural design of buildings, to which changes would substantially change the appearance and design
of the building, whereas antennas may be added or removed without such consequences.
The Petronas Twin Towers remain the tallest twin buildings in the world.
The Sears Tower and the World Trade Center towers were each constructed with 110 occupied floors – 22 more than the Petronas Twin Towers’ 88 floors.
The Sears Tower and the World Trade Center’s roofs and highest occupied floors substantially exceeded the height of the roof and highest floors
of the Petronas Twin Towers. The Sears Tower’s tallest antenna is 75 m (246 ft) taller than the Petronas Twin Towers’ spires.
However, in accordance to CTBUH regulations and guidelines,[2] the antennas of the Sears Tower were not counted as part of its architectural
features.Therefore, the Petronas Twin Towers exceed the official height of the Sears Tower by 10m, but the Sears Tower has more floors with occupied office space
at a higher level.
history
Designed by Argentine-American architect César Pelli, the Petronas Towers were completed in 1998 and became the tallest buildings in the world
on the date of completion. They were built on the site of Kuala Lumpur's race track.
Because of the depth of the bedrock, the buildings were built on the world's deepest foundations.
The 120-meter foundations were built by Bachy Soletanche, and required massive amounts of concrete.
The 88-floor towers are constructed largely of reinforced concrete, with a steel and glass facade designed to resemble motifs
found in Islamic art, a reflection of Malaysia's Muslim religion.
Another Islamic influence on the design is that the cross-section of the towers is based on a Rub el Hizb (albeit with circular sectors added to meet office space requirements). Due to a lack of steel and the huge cost of importing steel, the towers were constructed on a cheaper radical design of super high-strength reinforced concrete. High-strength concrete is a material familiar to Asian contractors and twice as effective as steel in sway reduction; however, it makes the building twice as heavy on its foundation than a comparable steel building. Supported by 23-by-23 meter concrete cores and an outer ring of widely-spaced super columns, the towers use a sophisticated structural system that accommodates its slender profile and provides from 1300 to 2000 square metres of column-free office space per floor.Below the twin towers is Suria KLCC, a shopping mall, and Dewan Filharmonik Petronas, the home of the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra.
Other buildings have used spires to increase their height but have always been taller overall to the pinnacle when trying to claim the title.
In the aftermath of the controversy, the rules governing official titles were partially overhauled, and a number of buildings
re-classified structural antenna as architectural details to boost their height rating (even though nothing was actually done to the building).
Tower One is fully occupied by Petronas and a number of its subsidiaries and associate companies.
The office spaces in Tower Two are mostly available for lease to other companies.
A number of companies have offices in Tower Two, including Accenture, Al Jazeera English, Carigali Hess Bloomberg, Boeing, IBM,
Khazanah Nasional Berhad, McKinsey & Co, TCS, HCL Technologies, Krawler Networks, Microsoft, The Agency (a modeling company) and Reuters.
KLCC Park
Main article: KLCC Park
Spanning 17 acres (69,000 m2) below the building is the KLCC park with jogging and walking paths,
a fountain with incorporated light show, wading pools, and a children's playground.
Suria KLCC is one of the largest shopping malls in Malaysia.
sky bridge
The towers feature a skybridge between the two towers on 41st and 42nd floors, which is the highest 2-story bridge in the world.
The bridge is 170m above the ground and 58 m long, weighing 750 tons.
The same floor is also known as the podium, since visitors desiring to go to higher levels have to change elevators here.
The skybridge is open to all visitors, but free passes (limited to 1700 people per day) must be obtained on a first-come, first-served basis.
Visitors are only allowed on the 41st floor as the 42nd floor can only be used by the tenants of the building.
The Lift System
The main bank of Otis lifts is located in the centre of each tower.
All main lifts are double-decker with the lower deck of the lift taking passengers to
odd numbered floors and upper deck to even numbered floors. In order to access an even numbered floor from ground level, passengers are required to use an escalator to access the upper deck of the elevator.
From the ground floor, there are three groups of lifts.
The "short haul" group of 6 lifts take passengers to floors between level 2/3 and level 16/17.
The "mid haul" group of 6 lifts take passengers to floors between level 18/19 and level 37/38.
There is also a set of shuttle lifts that take passengers directly to levels 41/42.
In order to get to levels above 41/42, passengers are required to take the shuttle lifts and then change lifts to the upper floors.
These connecting lifts are placed directly above the lifts serving levels 2 to 38.
The pattern now repeats with the upper levels, one set serving levels 43/44 to 57/58 and one set serving levels 59/60 to levels 73/74.
Apart from this main bank of lifts, there are a series of "connecting" lifts to take people between the groups.
Unlike the main lifts, these are not the double-decker type.
Two lifts are provided to take people from levels 37/38 to levels 41/42 (levels 39 and 40 are not accessible as office space).
This avoids the need for someone situated at the lower half of the building to go down to the ground floor in order to gain access to
the upper half of the building.
The 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 elevator cars
Service building
The service building is to the east of the Petronas Towers and contains the services required to keep the building operational,
such as dissipating the heat from the air-conditioning system for all 88 levels in both towers..
During an evacuation of the buildings, only the shuttle lift is allowed to be used.
This is because 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, t
his enclosed shaft would remain unaffected.
The skybridge also acts as a safety device, so that in the event of a fire or other emergency in one tower,
tenants can evacuate by crossing the skybridge to the other tower.
The total evacuation triggered by a bomb hoax on September 12, 2001
(the day after the September 11 attacks destroyed the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City)
showed that the bridge would not be useful if both towers need to be emptied simultaneously,
as the capacity of the staircases was insufficient for such an event.
Plans thus call for the lifts to be used if both towers need to be evacuated,
and a successful drill following the revised plan was conducted in 2005.
Notable events
Thousands of people were evacuated on September 12 2001 after a bomb threat was phoned in the day after the September 11 attacks destroyed the Twin Towers
of the World Trade Center in New York City.
Bomb squads found no explosives in the Petronas towers, and workers and shoppers were allowed to return three hours later, around noon.
No one was hurt, but six people fainted during the evacuation.
On the evening of Friday, November 4, 2005, a fire broke out in the cinema complex of the Suria KLCC shopping centre below the Petronas Twin Towers,
triggering panic among patrons who fled screaming and coughing in the thick, acrid smoke.
There were no reports of injuries.
The buildings were largely empty (except the shopping mall, Suria KLCC) because of the late hour; the only people affected were
moviegoers and some diners in restaurants.
Popular culture
The Petronas Towers were a setting for some scenes in the 1999 film Entrapment starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
It ends in a dramatic pursuit of the two stars by the Pasukan Gerakan Khas, eventually leading to Connery's capture and Zeta-Jones's escape.
In the episode, Bound and Buried, in Life After People: The Series, the towers are shown collapsing 500 years after people due to corrosion
and the weakening of the concrete columns.
The towers also feature in three levels of the game Hitman 2: Silent Assassin where the player travels from one tower to another
using the sky bridge, though it is unlike the real sky bridge; instead of being a narrow passageway,
the sky bridge is wide and entered by breaking a panel of glass.
The PS2 game Burnout Dominator features the Twin Towers as Spiritual Towers.
Episode 22 from the anime series Cowboy Bebop shows what closely resembles the Petronas Twin Towers being blown up by a terrorist.
This was taken off the air for a short time post-9/11.
The Petronas Towers are also a major setting in the 2006 Bollywood film, Don - The Chase Begins Again, starring Shah Rukh Khan.
On March 20, 1997, French urban climber, Alain "Spiderman" Robert, using only his bare hands and feet and with no safety devices, scaled the building's exterior glass and steel wall. Police arrested him at the 60th floor, 28 floors away from the "summit." He made a second attempt on March 20, 2007, exactly 10 years later, and was stopped once again on the same floor (though on the other tower).[
petronas twin tower
Stretching five and half kilometers into the Arabian Sea lays one of the most extra-ordinary engineering projects that the world has ever seen. PALM-JENERA, it’s so vast that it can even be seen from the space. Build only from sand and rock, threatened by earthquakes, violent storms and erosion from the sea, its remarkable that Palm-genera survives it all. The owner wanted an island in the ocean in the form of a palm tree. Engineers battled against the forces of nature and time to build one of the most audacious engineering marvels
August 2005 Dubai is building one of the biggest man made islands in the world. Engineers have a challenging task ahead of them because this is construction like no other. All structures stand and defines its nature, most of them build from concrete and steel, materials that are strong. But this mega structure is build out in sea with only natural materials like sand and rock
The project manager was ROBERT BERGER says “any construction is defies the nature and this is an extreme example of that, every day we try to prevent the destruction of what we build”
The Middle East, Dubai, the jewel of the Arab world, the kingdom build on the profit of its oil reserves, this tiny emerald, twice the size of London is one of the richest places in the whole world. It was not the same previously; 50 years ago Dubai was a trading town. Over the past half a century it’s been transformed. Now it’s famous for gold, trade, oil. But Dubai had a problem in the horizon, by 2016, its oil reserves are estimated to run out, which means disaster for the economy. Dubai needs to find a way out of it.
The crowned prince SHAIK MAHAMMED BIN RASHEED AL-MAKTUM has a two billion dollar plan to save his country. He ordered his kingdom to transform itself into world’s number one tourist destination. The crown prince has a history of getting whatever he wants. To put Dubai on the map, he has already built one of the world’s most luxurious hotels in the world. VERJANA, created top class golf and race coerces, now planning to build the tallest building in the world
But for now the crown prince’s idea is mass tourism, and Dubai seems the perfect place for it. It offers sun every day of the year, glorious beaches and breathtaking seems. Five million tourist visit Dubai each year, now they want to triple this to fifteen million. But there is a problem; the cost line is a mere seventy-two kilometer long, not enough space for these extra people. But how do you increase the coastline of a country and the crown prince’s plan was to build a massive island and once its build by two thousand and six what for a paradise island, in the shape of a palm tree five and a half kilometer across, it increases the coastline by a whopping 56km. but no one has ever build an island so very large
The extraordinary plan was to build an island in the shape of a palm, covered with luxury hotels and villas, shopping malls, restaurants. The crescent shaped part of the palm which is the entrance holds up to 22 hotels. The easiest way to build such a structure was to build it out of concrete and steel. But this plan of using concrete and steel does not fit with the idea of the prince’s. he wanted the islands to completely blend in with the surroundings. To blend in with the surrounding the islands needs to be made solemnly of natural materials like rock and sand. The palm shaped island took almost 54 million cubic meters of sand into it. To the edge of the palm there will be a circular ring shaped rock barrier and estimated amount of 5.5 million tons of rock went into it. This amount of rock and sand would be more than enough to build a circular ring of 2.5 meter circling the entire world.
Dubai is the only place that can bring about such a plan. It has the imagination, the wealth and above all the courage. To make this dream into reality Dubai requires some of the best engineers in the world. This world’s wide search leads to northern Europe, and Holland. The Dutch are experts in land reclamation; they have increased their land resources by about 25%, the Dutch team was immediately booked for the job. The first thing that they must prove that it’s possible to build an island the open sea of Arabian Gulf, and that it will stay there forever. To know more about they wanted to know more about the sea, its ferociousness, the height of the wave, and what effect is global warming having in raising the sea level. The biggest fear for all the engineers where the massive freak waves. These wave build up can destroy everything in their path. But the people of Dubai seems to be lucky, the researchers found out that the Dubai coast was the perfect place to build an artificial island. On an average the sea was only 30 m deep and only 160 km wide. This value seems to be too small for the catastrophic waves to develop and affect the island. But the team wanted to take no chances, because every winter the strong winds bring two meter waves that can damage the structure. They also took care of Somalia- a storm that hits once in a hundred years.
Just as they get started disaster strikes on September 11, 2001, the world trade centre trade centre is attacked in a brutal act of terrorism. Overnight tourism to the middle stops. Millions of dollars, months of research, hard work all in vein. Later travel abroad came to a standstill. There were about twelve hundred engineers who really feared the loss of their job. Business came to a standstill, beaches were empty, and hotels had no visitors. For three months Dubai was having a standstill.
After three months all the works stated again, the company hired for making the project was a very famous one. They had many projects completed to their credit. Hong-Kong cheplak Cock airport, Holland’s north sea wall, Singapore’s industrial sector, but no one had ever reclaimed a structure of this size and shape. By November 2001 the construction of the mega structure started again. 9 barges 15 tug boats 4 drenches, 13 heavy land base machines and 10 floating cairns were needed just to make the massive sea wall.
The team that builds the great wall had the first task of building up the sea floor. Three large drenches collect sand and they dump it where the wall has to be building. Each time they dump a 7.4 m high wall was formed. To keep this wall in place loads and loads of rocks are settled on top. This bed of rock will raise the wall to four meters below sea level and then to three meters above sea level t is the beginning of sea defense. Each piece of rock weighs up to 6 tonnes. The great wall had two layers; the upper layer is made up of specially selected rocks which are carefully placed by cranes and on the top layer it is estimated that there are about 5.5 billion cubic meters of rock, more than enough to build two large pyramids. This strong wall must stand for centuries, fighting against the forces of nature. These rocks are not simply put one over another , they are carefully graded and are kept considering their size shape, density, permeability etc. position by cranes each rock must interlock each other to stand the full force of the sea. Constant checks are made to ensure safety of the wall. To check the position of the rock divers are send, they find out if any rocks are misplaced, because any misplaced rock may cause the entire structure to crumble
January 2002 six months after the starting of the work, a large section of the wall stood still, it was just the beginning they had to complete another twelve kilometers to complete the entire wall.
The Dutch company that took the work made the agreement for two years. With the onset of winter the engineers face a new problem, the storm that blew with a speed of 55km/hr and even more. The massive wind prevented the machine from keeping the rocks with pin point accuracy. Because of the winter the construction company lost three weeks of work and this was a major reason for worries. Even after the storm the great wall build stood still without any destruction. They had two and a half years to complete the great palm and the wall.
To complete this in two years they needed to construct the palm and the wall side by side. The sand pumping machine pumped sand in the shape of the palm and finally a shape of the palm was developed on the sea. It needed about 93 million cubic meters of sand to fill it. This amount was more than enough to cover the whole of Manhattans. Reclamation cannot be done with any normal sand, finding the right sand in the right quantity was another major problem. Six nautical miles west a typical type of sand was found which was apt for the purpose. It was apt because it would not be easily washed away by the sea. They will drench sand from the gulf sea bed, there is an extra advantage, and the drenches will only require 3 hours to drench the sand and then deposited it to the specified spot and then return back to the spot.
Construction team worked day and night to build up the palm. The sand is rainbow blasted to form the palm. The huge machine that sprays sand uses global positioning system to locate the position. Slowly and slowly as the world watches the palm island becomes a reality. After 9/11 Dubai emerges as a safe destination for the people to visit. Beaches fill again, business resumes, the crown prince’s gamble to continue construction has yielded well. There were two teams one building the great wall and other building the palm. If they do not move in synchronicity, the whole project would be thrown into disaster. If the great wall construction went quickly it would cut of the path to the palm and if the palm went off quickly then it would be simply washed away by the waves. It was not possible to let one above the other. It was actually a delicate balance. And above all odds the palm island raises above the water. There is another major problem for the engineers; it’s to make the island suitable for construction, stable and highly strong.
Now there arise a second problem, it was a result of inadequate research. The wall prevented the flow of tidal wave in and out of the
lets google....google
LETS GOOGLE.................GOOGLE
Has there ever been a brand name like Google. Not existing a few decade before google has become a global verb, as in I googled this or I googled that or I googled you .
To Google, definition , to look upon anything in the internet using Google’s supercomputers, and get an instant answer. The company that started as a school project is now worth billions. Google showed hike in its share price when it went public.Now let us get into the stores of GOOGLE so that we can GOOGLE them.
Seven hundred million times a day someone somewhere in the world is using Google to search the internet. The pictures that are you see below are of an electronic glob that shows the number of Google searches that happen throughout the world. Every spot in the glob represents a Google search, every colour that you see in the glob represents the Google searches that are done in different languages.
FOUNDERS FIRST
Both BRANE and LARRY PAGE come from briny families, Larry’s dad is a computer science professor, Surgey’s dad a math professor. They even look a little bit alike but in their personalities they are opposite. Page is shy almost introvert Brane more outgoing, something of a show man. What both of them are really good at is writing computer codes. They met as PhD students, where both where trying to find out how to make things easier on the internet. They realized that a lot of the search engines of that time (the dark ages) 1998, inundated you with a bewildering and disorganized list of every web site that had the key word that you are searching for. They tried to make an arrangement that can present you with the best possible results that you wanted. They both sat down to make an algorithm or a series of software code that could create a ranking system by relevance. they installed this to the computers of Stanford University. This test search engine that they created was named as Google. Google is a math term which means one followed by a hundred zeros. The software which was installed to the computers of Stanford grew popular. Eventually the two founders ran out of computers, its stares to grow. They stared to build their own computers and moved into their world head quarters that garage. At the beginning they two could not mange it on their own, but unlike the other big dot com co-operatives they were very conservative. The rise of Google started during the dot com boom google had established itself into a major competitor in this field.
When that dot com boom went bust in late 2000, google was the odd company which could survive. infact for them it seems as if the internet bust never happened. There were party, everyone was enjoying their work but unlike Google most of the companies in the Silicon Valley opposite was true, it was like a smoldering wreckage. A lot of people lost their job, it was this time that Google hired some of the smartest engineers. They were so thankful to Google that they got job.The company motto is again an important thing that makes Google so very special. One of Its mottos is to do no evil. Do no evil means Google has laid down a list of procedures similar to that of a code of contact according to which they make all their decisions. For example Google search engine does not mix the Google adds with that of your search results. It comes under do no evil. With this Google intends to keep it searches independent of any business relationships. To this day Google has not run a TV commercial. Its popularity is from purely by word of mouth…..amazing isn’t it …..?
Problem with Google
This unique search engine is so popular these days that every common man uses it to get anything he wants. An old girl friend, A new girl friend, an old car, a new gadget, serious, frivolous no matter what you want Google has an answer to it. For example you type in Paris Hilton and Google’s supercomputers roughly a hundred thousand of them will look into the nook and corner of every page in the internet that has the word Paris Hilton written on it, six and a half million pages with that name and six thousand million pictures of Paris Hilton are listed out in its priority within a half a second.
Looking at the huge company head quarters in silicon valley it is hard to imagine that a few decade before the company consisted of the Russian born Brine and co-founder Larry page worked in a converted garage. According to the founder brine “during those days (early days of google) a wardroom table was also a ping-pong table, with no dress code and we looked like students”
In fact most of them still look like collage students. Inside Google the platform seems like a college dorm than a corporate office. You will find bikes in the hall ways ,dogs under the desk, and above all there is a strong spirit of play . Besides ping pong there is a volley ball game played every day in the noon. Google still organizes a skew trip for its entire staff every year.
Google can afford a lot of things these days; in fact most of them became millionaires when the stock went public. BRINE and GAUGE hardly into their thirties at that time they both worth six billion dollars each. They were doing everything possible to prevent money from being a distraction. Each day was just another day of work for them no matter how much they earned. Believe me , each one of them had the money to buy a dozen of jaguar, but simplicity is what they opted for.
Google the brand name
JOHN BRITTEN, an author and entrepreneur who has been following the companies in silicon valley for more than twenty years.
According to him “Google has a brand image because it’s all about internet, it’s all about innovation, all about trust, not about selling out, not about getting rich quick, since you got a culture like that and if anyone was to buy a new Mercedes and drive around with the serial blaring, and miss work a couple of days, that would not be an acceptable behavior in Google, the peer pressure has picked in, trust me there is a Mercedes convertible in every one of their hands ,there is , and it will come out.”As if to prove that they are not distracted by the money, Google is trying to keep itself well in its limits.
What seems is that Google is announcing a new product every week. Google print, Google blogger, piccasa, Google chrome, Google scholar, Google desktop search, Google sms. Of which Google print helps you to search millions of books searchable online, they even include Oxford’s and Hayward’s collection of books. Google desktops which help you to search your own computers hard drive. Another new edition to this is ‘keyhole‘this gives you a satellite imagery of any address that you need . just type the address and you get the satellite image of that place.
Google’s style is to raise their product in the beta form that is not finished yet. Let users play with them for free and make suggestions. Actually almost anything that is present in the home page of Google is free. So is that you find a less crowded and add free home page for Google.
But how do Google make
Money
On the home page type the word flowers and you get a number of results .To the left side of the page you have a list of web site that Google rated as the top websites. Towards the right you can see sponsored links. When you click on the one of the Google’s sponsored links that company pays Google. For example when you clicked FTD, FTD paid Google. It’s a revolutionary idea. The rates so low that almost anyone from the biggest company to the smallest mom and pope can afford to advertise in Google.
Eric Smith Google’s 55 years old CEO whom Brine and Page hired in 2004, says that the pool of potential advertisers are limitless. He feels that Google along with the companies to which it is an advertisement partner are enabling a kind of new kind of commerce between very small communities. For those firms which cannot afford to or that does not earn from the traditional advertisement mechanism like television or radio can advertise in Google and find a good and worldwide market for their product.
Google’s kick to Microsoft and yahoo
Bill gates never thought that Google would snatch of its monopoly over the internet seach until it actually did the same. He (bill gates) quickly launches the MSN (Microsoft search engine) which was similar to that of the Google Desktop. Google Desktop is actually a software that can organize the data in your computer. This is what Microsoft Windows does. Google desktop is a direct challenge to Microsoft , there was no doubt about that. And since then Google is going after Microsoft, in fact the war is on. There was another competitor “yahoo” that also felt the heat of Google started to fight back.
According to Google’s CEO the reason for Google emerging as the winner is that every one is interested in fighting in the last war whereas Google is interested in finding out something new , thts where the genius of Google lies in.
Where is Google Going?
Multimillionaire SURGEY BRANE and LARRY PAGE the 38 and 39 old founders of Google still share the same old tiny head quarters that’s how they always worked. They make every major decision together. They personally approve the hiring of every employee.
Trying for a job in Google
Yes if you are young .if you can solve Google’s test then you can be a part of Google. Google being so fast growing Google has to take in at least fifty people every week. And while doing so they stick to their rigorous screening process, and it’s a fact that there are a thousand resumes that come to Google every day.
ALLEN is the engineer who is in charge of hiring people. If you want to be a employee of google you will need to crack the GLAD ( Google labs aptitude test).according to Allen there are a certain class of people who finds these tricky question fun. If you feel you are that kind of a person and you have the brains to crack the hard problem then please don’t be of the wrong impression that you are into Google, according to one employ, it took him fourteen stages of interview to get into the PR department. This is done to make sure that you don’t just have the brains you need to have an attitude ,and should be motivated.
But once you are into Google, Google does everything possible to make you happy. Its look like every day is a party for them. They have a fabulous canteen where food is all free. You can get Chinese, Mexican, Delhi any kind of food.
Latest of Google
Google has a lot of workaholic people who burn their brains to find out new products. One such product is Multilanguage system. That is if you have a data in Russian and you want it in engilsh. Then what you need to do is to push a butto and you will get it in English. Already a beta version is available in the market.
Another is to search for TV shows and videos searchable in the internet.Google is now not limited to your pc its now slowly moving into your mobile phone. If you want to find out a place or a building what you need to do is to type the address and sent it a number .Google’s supr computers will give you an instant reply saying the exact location of the place.
Another major product of Google is software that compares the price of a product that is present in different shops. You can compare the price buy your product simply by sitting in your house