Every WELL Platinum project begins with a gap analysis to identify what the building already meets, what needs work, and what requires significant effort. When we first scoped Merdeka 118, that analysis had to account ffor a scale the WELL standard rarely sees: 292,000 square metres of gross floor area across 118 storeys spanning lobbies, facility management floors, restaurants, gyms, medical spaces, and offices, with each zone presenting distinct measurement conditions. Airscan had to measure, analyse, and execute testing across one of the most complex built environments ever certified.
Twenty-one thousand measurements later, Merdeka 118 is the tallest WELL Platinum building in the world.
The WELL standard meets the supertall
The WELL Building Standard is flexible by design, but Merdeka 118 is still very much an outlier. Each zone had unique HVAC setups, occupancy patterns, and pressure conditions that change at higher elevations, making the balance of those elements a massive logistical challenge. Validating compliance across every square metre of the building required a non-standard certification approach. We distributed sampling points across altitude bands and functional zones, ranging from lower levels to mid-rise offices and upper hotel-adjacent storeys.
Months of planning and preparation preceded the on-site work. We modelled and analysed each test multiple times, which made it possible to execute the full performance verification campaign in just three days.
Five team members. Fifty hours on site. We walked roughly 450,000 steps across the building to record 9,600 individual air quality measurements, 500 thermal comfort points, 150 lighting readings, eight hours of acoustic data, and 55 litres of water for lab analysis. Just moving between some testing locations took up to half an hour.
The team behind the building
What stood out most about this project was the client’s conviction. PNB’s building management team genuinely believes in what this certification represents. We see enough green building projects to know when a client just wants a medal for the lobby, but PNB had people driving this commitment long before Airscan arrived. They take occupant wellbeing personally, even employing an in-house psychologist for staff health and welfare.
That conviction changed the practical dynamics of the project. Access coordination was seamless, technical questions were answered immediately, and the facilities team treated our testing schedule as their own priority. On a project of this size, that responsiveness determined how efficiently we could work and the quality of the data we collected.
The line that stays
Merdeka 118 is the tallest WELL Platinum building in the world because PNB decided their occupants deserved that standard of environmental quality. Then they committed the time and rigour to meet it. Our role was to verify whether the building performs for the people inside it. And across 21,000 measurements and 118 floors, it does.
