The design for a new office tower on a vacant land parcel within an existing 25-acre IT/ITES SEZ campus presented two key challenges. The first was to plug in the new building meaningfully within the existing cluster of office buildings, to the established mobility networks and to the key public / open spaces. The second was to be cognizant of the client’s brief for a marquee project -one that would be ‘contemporary’ and ‘enhance the aesthetics’ of what existed.
Client: Brookfield Properties
GFA: 17350 SQM
Completion: 2020
Architects: Plural Design Consultants Pvt. Ltd.
Scope: Concept Planning, Design Development, Tender and Construction documentation.
Design Team:
Architecture – Sandip Kumar, Nibha Kumari, Taniya Sharma, Sagar Ingawale.
Interior Design – Indrani Sen, Divya Badhan, Pinky Pal.
Landscape Design – Suneet Mohindru, Harbir Singh, Sanampreet Singh Virk, Shreeparna.
Landscape Architects: Oracles
MEP Consultants: One Design & Consultants
Structure: Preetek Consulting Engineers
Sustainability Consultants: En3 Sustainability Solutions
Façade: Dema Consulting
Project Management: Cushman & Wakefield
Photography Credits: Sushil Khandelwal
The site for the building was an outlier of sorts, on the periphery, and not amenable to the obvious and evident pre-built geometries. The design ideation began with an intuitive sense to try and establish, or if one may say, invent a diagonal connect, both notionally and physically between 3 key components – first, the central open areas of the campus, second, the public spaces in the new building’s programme i.e. its entrance, lobbies, retail and other common facilities, and lastly, a lush clump of trees just beyond the site.
This connect became both, a key device, and a space to organize the ground plan, almost as a void and a street that pierced its way through the column grids to become a contiguous and extended public realm, a manufactured axis to plug the new building with the already built campus. It also manifested as a portal, that gazes out and draws people and space in, to the new building and to the trees beyond.
The built expression of lower two floors respond to this urban connectedness that the building aspires to in more ways than one. The building profile at this level, both in plan and section, crafts itself to the pedestrian scale, acknowledges them, gives them a moment to pause, to engage, and to collect. The built volume at upper levels, responding more to the exigencies of maximizing floor areas within the irregular land parcel, floats above in an almost disconnected way.
Heat gain is limited due to mutual shading from a tower adjacent to the south-facing longer façade, while the shorter east and west facades have limited glazed surfaces. Use of horizontal façade fins, careful selection of building materials and energy efficient technologies have further helped the building achieve an IGBC Platinum rating.
