a class ahead

Through educated design, innovation and sustainability, the PETRONAS Leadership Centre delivers the essential needs of flexible learning as a campus for our times and beyond.

- Nizar Musa

The development of human capital at PETRONAS, Malaysia’s leading global energy group, has been integral to its performance, growth and success. That development can be traced in part to its PERMATA campus which, founded in 1989, continues to support the group’s diverse needs through comprehensive management and leadership training. In 2022, that focus sharpens with the unveiling of the PETRONAS Leadership Centre or PLC, which picks up its predecessor’s mantle of leadership to bequeath the organisation a future-forward campus of pedigree and inspiration.

a certain prestige

Designers VERITAS Architects’ early role on the project, and onward collaboration with PETRONAS, involved studies into site selection, programme and space planning. Upgrading the legacy PERMATA campus was also a consideration, though modern-day facility requirements – especially one replete with deluxe accommodation and facilities conducive for new ways of learning, virtual or otherwise – would eventually scupper that option.

The outcome of those exercises, and clearly visible from both street and airplane, is a bold 23,724 sqm curvilinear form. Straddling a 34-acre site, the architects eschewed conventional shoebox archetypes for a sweeping oeuvre of concatenated glass, fins and overhangs, manifesting a sinuous (and perhaps even majestic) edifice cleverly intersected by wings of classrooms and a radial arc of building clusters.