Client : Petronas Berhad
Status : Completed 2022
Designed to nestle within a heavily landscaped estate, the new Petronas Leadership Centre is a sprawling 14 ha campus located near Bangi, Selangor. The campus is designed to encourage social collaboration and enhance future learning experiences through innovative spaces in support of Petronas’ corporate and work culture.
The design objective was to distill the essence of an experiential journey to encourage maximum interactive encounters among all employees while retaining the integrity of the Petronas ethos. This translates into a focus that transcends imitation or pastiche. At the same time, there was an impetus to break away from traditional campus planning, to innovate and adapt the design to the locality whilst celebrating the purpose of the organization.
The form of the 45,000 sm campus is a curved central pedestrian spine that becomes the main infrastructure focus and which links all building components. Classrooms and accommodation blocks are thus interweaved closely to create spatial cohesion. Spaces are physically connected via crossing pedestrian bridges adjoining classrooms, guest rooms, and public spaces to allow seamless visual interaction and connectedness to all parts of the program.
The cascading building form, responding directly to the project’s physical demands, introduces a new skyline to the existing flat greenfield site. The campus is designed to nestle into nature and embrace a vast manmade lake that offers acoustic and visual buffers.
The overall building form may seem impractical, but is actually derived from the logical physical needs of the campus program, with its form sculpted around landscape areas that allow face-to-face interaction, and the central spine curved to create a meandering visual perspective and a transformational journey. This also allows for various flexibilities to space planning which is important to the campus operation, whilst encouraging the external landscape to permeate into the indoor spaces.