Located in Jakarta’s central business district of Sudirman, Sequis Tower makes a space for itself in the city skyline. Drawing inspiration from the Banyan tree for both design influence and metaphoric meaning, the tower is meant to look like it’s rising organically from the ground.

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A bird's-eye view of a city with several skyscrapers.

Sequis Tower encompasses roughly 1.5 million square feet and 40 floors. This includes spaces for offices, healthcare facilities, shops and restaurants.

An image looking up at the side of a high-rise tower.

The innovative design uses a series of landscaped terraces composed of four bundled super-tubes. While this certainly makes the tower eye-catching, it also creates a range of different floorplates. This makes the building extremely structurally sound, which is essential considering the tower’s location in an active seismic zone.

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A section of a high-rise building with a reflective facade.

While the tower wall is designed to provide beautiful views of the surrounding world, it also reduces solar heat gain, which helps keep cooling costs down. Other sustainable elements have also been integrated into the design, such as high-efficiency building systems. Additionally, using locally-sourced and recycled building materials helped reduce the tower’s embedded energy, while also staying true to the building’s central theme of rising from the landscape like an organic structure.

A car parked by the entrance to a large building with a glass facade.

On the ground level, the tower includes spaces for pedestrians. The building’s parking area is elevated, so the ground floor remains open for green areas and walkways. The design includes an elevated park, too.

A plaza area with wood benches and a covered sitting area where people lounge. To the left there are small trees and shrubs.

KPF, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, received two major awards for Sequis Tower, starting with a design award recognizing the tower’s human-focused, efficient design. The second is a sustainability award, proving that good design and sustainability can go hand-in-hand. The building also won a slew of additional awards, including Best Green Development and Best Office. Sequis Tower is also one of the first LEED Platinum buildings in all of Indonesia. In fact, it performs 36% better than the LEED baseline.

+ KPF

Images via Mario Wilbowo Photography