PACE Tower
Kuala Lumpur’s intensity calls for a renewed balance between density and calm. Emerging from a raised public garden, the project reintroduces nature and collective space into the urban core, forming a vertical neighborhood where living, working, and community coexist within a continuous landscape of layered outdoor life.
The project is grounded in a clear urban and structural logic: a solid base that occupies the entire plot, anchoring the development to the city while lifting the tower, and strategically locating it to reduce noise from the nearby highway. From this grounded condition, a square plan emerges—recalling the fundamental geometry of traditional Malaysian architecture—and sets a simple, enduring order that organizes the entire composition.
Within this framework, the tower draws inspiration from the lightness and temporary nature of Malaysia’s most humble structures, from fishermen piers to stilt houses and traditional longhouses. This sensibility is translated into deep terraces that reinterpret the longhouse’s shaded verandas, extending the building outward and creating a continuous dialogue between light, shade, and climate.
A rich mixed-use program unfolds, retail, cafés, spa, offices, co-working, podcast studios, parking, and diverse residential typologies, interwoven with sky gardens that introduce moments of nature throughout the tower and culminate in a panoramic restaurant open to the city. At its base, a generous double-height hall welcomes both residents and visitors, offering a calm threshold for gathering and pause, removed from the intensity of the street.
At the heart of the project, a raised walled garden defines a suspended urban oasis. Framed yet open to the Kuala Lumpur skyline, it creates a rare condition of stillness where enclosure and horizon coexist, encouraging slowness, reflection, and a deeper connection to nature within the density of the city.
The entire composition is held together by a continuous grid of concrete columns, bringing coherence and precision to the development while regulating proportions across all uses. This structural order becomes the backbone of clarity and permanence, while horizontality is expressed through continuous thin slabs and recessed glass façade which creates depth and rhythm, opening each level to expansive views over the skyline.
Inside, the atmosphere is shaped by natural, tactile materials—handmade ceramic tiles, linen curtains, white marble, and local timber furniture—composed with restraint to create intimacy and calm, where light is carefully controlled and essential living takes precedence.
The ambition of the project is to ultimately become an urban oasis: an horizontal landscape that grows in verticality where architecture endorses a slower and contemplative way of living within the intensity of downtown Kuala Lumpur.
Location: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Plot Size: 18,000 sqm
Client: Private Developer
