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It's been a while, but I just completed another review of a building in Putrajaya. It'll be published in a magazine next month...

"The Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment (MNRE) building in Putrajaya is one of a quartet of buildings formed along the central boulevard of the city that marks the transition between the official part of town from its more commercial parts. The masterplanning for this urban junction was won by Veritas Architects in 2000 and they were subsequently given the commission to design a quarter of its components.

The masterplan envisages 4 podium-cum-tower developments that are related on plan in such as way that the form of the 4 towers are circumscribed by the intersection between 6 imaginary circles. In the absence of any urban context in the then barren landscape, this geometric device gave the development a much needed mode of formal organization. The masterplan had been about the creation of a context that would hold its own presence along the pageant of architectural heavyweights that fronts the boulevard. (Its limitation is then that any expansion or alterations to these 4 buildings would mar their present coherence.) But each individual building in this group is given the flexibility to project its own identity through its façade treatment. Their common denominator is that of a podium block which wraps around the tower block in an L-shaped manner. In turn, the 18-storey tower is detached from the podium by a strip of naturally-ventilated atrium which reaches all the way down to the ground of a naturally-ventilated basement. Double-volume arcades ring the first storey of the podium block. Due consideration has also been given for the users who arrive by bus in the form of a bus stop incorporated along one side of the podium, and pedestrians would immediately be ushered into a defined but sheltered walkway, yet the reality is that most users arrive by car, as with the rest of the city. An underground rail link is planned to run beneath the street of the boulevard with perhaps a station to serve the 4 offices in the future, but for the present, the population of this surreal city which numbers around 50,000 in the daytime, could hardly warrant any urgency in its construction. (Just why then does the governmental buildings here reach up to 18-storeys in hugely vacant surroundings is another one of those debatable aspects about the city. One would have thought that high-rise congestion was the key reason why the government has opted to move out of Kuala Lumpur in the first place.)

Generally, buildings planned to be a part of a centralized pattern are not ideally suited to counter solar heat gain by minimizing its east-west façade. The orientation of the 4 towers blocks are such that should one pair be least exposed to the sun’s path, the other pair will suffer the opposite. The MNRE falls within the pair that has it good. Its almond shaped tower is aligned along its longer length towards the east and west axis.

The structure is basically reinforced concrete frame with an external layer of intumescent-painted steel-framed corridor around the podium block. These external corridors are also naturally-ventilated, and because they are not superfluous (in that they replace the internal circulation space within the office) they also reduce the overall air-conditioning load of the office. Additionally, they provide another sun-shading zone to the glazed facades. On the west façade, the corridors are mounted with sliding timber-louvred screen panels, and these can be moved manually to increase the effective cooling. A flip side to such a strategy is the marginal lost of window views for occupants who sit next to these corridors, and who might themselves be subjected to a sense of exposure to passers-by. This layout is thus utilized only for the offices of the podium block.

Environmental-friendly features for the tower block includes locating the service core to the eastern edge of the shaft, with the theory that the eastern face is on the whole warmer than the western side in Malaysia, because it rains more often in the afternoons than in the mornings. It is also on this finding that there are minimal sun-shading device found on the western edge of the tower block, when compared with its heavily shaded podium directly below it, and this gives the tower-podium a somewhat incongruous relationship. Internally, giving the office tower a side service-core also frees up the floor plan for a more efficient office layout. No spot of the workspace is more than 12m away from the windows.

On plan, the tip of the eastern shaft is also dedicated to outdoor roof gardens, and there a one of these for every 3 floors. The open gardens envelop a steel fire-escape staircase which is well-ventilated against smoke build-up. They are welcomed areas of respite for office workers and are particularly well-used in the afternoons.

Greenery is also the key feature of the curved atrium between tower and podium. Offices that face the atrium are fully-glazed, with views to the bamboos planted across the space. The richness of joints, materials and light levels, and the way the sun-shading louvers are progressively reduced the further one gets into this arcaded spine, are all indications of the sensible thinking and effort that goes into making this atrium the building’s most satisfying place.

80% of the materials used for the building are produced locally. The marble facing is quarried in Borneo, the timber is local Balau, and the aluminium strip ceiling panels are the same one produced and used so extensively in the Kuala Lumpur International Airport- complete with timber colour and grain. Throughout, the steel detailing is expressed with confidence, although the workmanship can be found wanting at various places. A recurring motif is the splayed wedge, the vertical line that tilts slightly towards its side, and this can be discerned in the fenestration patterns, stainless steel weather screens, aluminium brise-soleil, and even in the massing of the tower itself. It is a slant that it is intended to be an allusion to the traditional weaving pattern of the “ikat” fabric, and it is most evident on the steel screen mounted on the wall of the northern corridor. Whatever its basis, the motif does introduce a sense of dynamism to a composition that is predominantly orthogonal.

Uncharacteristically, the building has none of the more obvious motifs and decorations that so pervades the other buildings found in Putrajaya. By comparison, it possesses a sense of corporate calmness, almost to the point of blandness, which is not entirely inappropriate to its function and setting. The interest is instead generated at the street level, where a rich interplay of materials and details are on display. In a street of prima donnas, being low-key and inconspicuous is one way to command the quiet respect it so naturally deserves. It heralds a maturing architecture for Veritas Architects that tempers the International Style with a truer sense of place than many of the other buildings on offer in Putrajaya."

Chup