Menara Mesiniaga

Ken Yeang had been arguing since his Cambridge doctorate that a tall building in the tropics should be designed from the climate outward rather than sealed and cooled. Menara Mesiniaga, the fifteen-storey headquarters of the Malaysian IBM distributor at Subang Jaya, is where the whole argument appears in one building. Planting starts at a battered earth base and spirals up the tower on recessed terraces; external sunshades are sized to the solar path, so the east and west faces are shaded and the north and south are opened; lift lobbies, stairs and toilets sit on the hot side of the plan and are naturally ventilated and daylit rather than air conditioned; a steel louvre canopy sits over the roof terrace and pool. The building took the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1995, and the devices it standardised have since been repeated across tropical Asia.