OVER the past week, Bangunan Sultan Abdul Samad has taken on a new life online. Social media feeds have been flooded with videos and reels of first-time visitors stepping through its doors – savouring the Moorish arches and tiled corridors, panning across newly opened museums, peeking into retail and craft spaces – Royal Selangor Gallery and KL City Gallery Gift Shop – and pausing, inevitably, for coffee at the Bakehouse by KLCG or Kaw Kaw Malaya. A building once admired from a distance is now being explored in real time, reframed through countless personal lenses.

Among the most captivating stops is the Balai Pertemuan on the first floor. Here, visitors slow down. Phones tilt upward, voices drop, and the scale of the space settles in. The inaugural exhibition, A City of Dreams: Kuala Lumpur 1820s–1974, unfolds as a visual and narrative journey through the city’s transformation – from modest riverine settlement to capital shaped by trade, migration and ambition. Archival images, large scale models, maps and stories chart how Kuala Lumpur took form, layer by layer, against the backdrop of a changing nation.