Construction Projects Around the World

2) In Kuala Lumpur and once held the top spot. Constructed in 1988 this was built on Kuala Lumpur's race track. What seems strange is that different construction companies were employed for each tower. I suppose this was healthy competition to ensure the job was completed on schedule. (If you really wanted to know, Tower 2 won the race).

To give you an idea of its height Alain Robert, the Gerard Depardieu of the climbing world, attempted to scale the towers without ropes or harnesses.

It's great to see these Malaysian office workers so happy and yet he failed to finish the climb. He also failed in 1997 when he was caught at the 60th floor, 28 short of the 88th storey skyscraper. The police simply opened a window and pulled him back in. Something tells me we might be seeing Alain again as he has tried to climb virtually everything including Taipei 101.

To give you an idea of what he faced from the street have a look at the view
http://panoramas.dk/fullscreen3/f50_petronas.html

Fantastic fact: Apparently, the shape of the floors is based on an eight-point star, common in Malaysian Islamic patterns and the towers have so many windows that window washers take a month to clean each tower!

Less fantastic fact: The Towers were featured in the film Entrapment with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Sean Connery. The backdrop in the film was a shanty town surronding the building when this is nowhere near the reality. This caused some controversy in Malaysia as it was portrayed as a backwards country.