Building the World's Second Tallest Skyscraper

Video narrated and hosted by Fred Mills. This video and article contain paid promotion for KONE.

WHEN you think about tall cities, places like New York, Dubai and Hong Kong will all jump to mind, but Kuala Lumpur (KL) is up there with the best of them.

Malaysia ranks fourth in the world for the number of skyscrapers it has and 148 of them are in its capital city. There’s the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the amazing Exchange 106, and of course the iconic Petronas Towers, which were the tallest buildings in the world from 1998 to 2004.

But all of those feel like mere bungalows compared to Merdeka 118. When its spire was completed in 2022, it took the building’s height up above 600-metres, making it officially one of only four megatall skyscrapers on the planet. It’s 678.9 metres high, 118-storeys tall and will house around 10,000 people.

Above: Merdeka 118 rising up through the clouds. 

Such a huge number of people sounds almost abstract, but to get a sense of what that feels like, take a short trip away from Merdeka 118 to Bukit Bintang, the beating heart of Kuala Lumpur. Standing at the main crossroads, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the people shooting past you in all directions in cars, on scooters and in the overhead monorail. Now imagine taking all of that and squeezing it into a small box inside a very tall building.

This also highlights the age-old problem with skyscrapers. Tall buildings are built around a structural core which, as well as keeping the whole thing standing, provides a great vertical access route up through the tower. Here you’ll find the plumbing, power, other services and crucially, the elevator shafts – and you really can’t overstate the importance of elevators to making our tall buildings viable. Nobody would want to go to level 118 if it means taking 118 flights of stairs.

Around the core is the usable floor area which houses hotels, offices, penthouses or anything else that the building is designed for. The problem that arises is the taller a building gets, the more floors are created which in turn creates more people needing to use the building.

Putting in enough elevators to service all these people all means the core gets bigger and the usable floor space is reduced. Before long, the available space for sale inside the building dwindles to such an extent that it's no longer viable. So, for a very high building to make sense, engineers need to get clever and find ways to keep the core from getting too big.

Above: The skyscraper’s core is used to house an array of utilities and services, such as plumbing and the elevator shafts.

To learn more, we spoke to Basil Carlo-Stella, APM Senior Vice President for New Building Solutions at KONE, the elevator company that helped make this enormous building viable:

“When you look at how people move in this building, it becomes quite critical for the experience they have. And when you consider that there's 10,000 people in this building, it's quite important to work exactly how they're going to move.”

Above and Below: The B1M's Fred Mills wearing a safety harness as he visits the construction site at the top of Merdeka 118.

KONE installs elevators, escalators and all kinds of systems that help energy-efficient people flow, everywhere. Each day, their tech moves over a billion people across this planet and is shaping future lives in cities, but the world’s second tallest building forced them to take elevator engineering to new heights.

Here, they helped create a system that effectively splits the building into five zones. Each zone is served by a shuttle elevator which shoots people up the building from the ground floor and into their zone at a speed of 10-metres a second.

From there, a series of local elevators take people on to the specific floor they want to reach. If you worked on level 94, each morning you would take an express elevator directly to level 76 before changing into a local car that serves the individual floors in that zone.

This approach means you can effectively stack more elevator shafts on top of each other within the building, preserving valuable floor space further up the building while maintaining a good experience for everyone inside.

It’s a tried and tested way of making megatall structures like this commercially viable, and KONE were brought in early in the design process to implement it, working with architects and engineers on how the core would be shaped.

But at Merdeka 118, the push for super-efficient people flow didn’t stop there, because there’s another simple way to double up capacity: double deck elevators.

As Carlo-Stella explains, “on a simplistic level the double decker elevator is essentially two elevators on top of each other which are attached”.

Above: Passengers are split up into groups in local zones.

Once you’ve reached your local zone, an AI enabled destination control system splits users into two groups. It sends passengers travelling to odd number floors into the lower deck of the elevator, while those heading to even floors are sent to the upper deck.

These double deck elevators make up an incredible 37 of the 89 elevators used in Merdeka 118. Carlo-Stella is keen to stress the importance of these for the overall people flow strategy:

“If you didn’t have this system you would need a lot more elevators. So all of a sudden you can see that a lot of the revenue you lose for each square foot becomes quite significant”.

Pulling a double-deck elevator full of people up the world’s second tallest building takes some serious kit. Which is why at Merdeka 118 KONE installed their MX100 elevator engines. These engines are capable of lifting a fully loaded, eight tonne elevator car at a speed of 10 metres per second.

But getting them in place is no easy job as the engines themselves weigh seven tonnes. This requires careful coordination with the building’s main contractor as the tower crane must lift the engines from street level into place before the floor becomes sealed off.

Above: KONE's Basil Carlo-Stella (left) and The B1M's Fred Mills (right) inside Merdeka 118's elevator machine room. 

But that’s not the only challenge faced during the construction phase. Simply getting workers around such a massive project before its fast elevators are installed can present a serious challenge.

Normally during construction, people and materials are brought up and down by slower external elevators called construction hoists. But there’s fertile ground for efficiency here too. As a skyscraper rises, KONE’s Jumplifts can be fitted inside the lower parts of completed elevator shafts in the main core.

A crucial implication of this is that KONE’S Jumplifts can work independently of weather conditions. Traditional construction hoists are exposed to the elements and for safety reasons have to cease operation in strong wind or other extreme weather.

Keeping people moving around a construction site means less time is lost due to work stoppages, which in turn creates a more efficient, cost effective project.

Four Jumplifts were used on Merdeka 118 and helped ferry 4,000 workers around what was one of the world’s largest vertical construction sites.

Above: Merdeka 118 under construction high above Kuala Lumpur.

Looking at the extreme lengths construction crews go through to build Merdeka 118 raises the question of why? For decades Kuala Lumpur has looked to the skies to create a sense of identity. But even with that in mind, the story of Merdeka 118 stands head and shoulders above the rest.

To really understand that story, we spoke to Tengku Dato Abdul Aziz, CEO of Merdeka Ventures, the owner and builder of the tower:

“To us Merdeka 118 tower represents a new iconic landmark called the city of Kuala Lumpur.

If you look at the silhouette of the building, we have a spire at the top of the tower which represents the outstretched hand of Malaysia’s first Prime Minister when he declared Merdeka, meaning independence”.

Merdeka 118 takes a huge moment in this country’s history and uses it to create a powerful, multifaceted and modern vision for the future. For Tengku Dato Abdul Aziz, Merdeka 118 will hopefully one day become as recognisable an icon of Kuala Lumpur as the Eiffel Tower is for Paris or the Burj Khalifa is for Dubai.

This video and article contain paid promotion for KONE. To learn how KONE is helping shape future cities, click here.

Video narrated and hosted by Fred Mills. Additional footage and images courtesy of Styfly, Columbia Pictures, KONE.