Jindal Pipes Corporate Office

The project entailed taking a completed building and designing the interiors for it with obvious constraints imposed on the interior architecture as the building design was done independently and with little provision for the intended and eventual use of the building. Although this was a huge challenge, but also made the design process immensely interesting. The building had a large out of scale central open space designed with little or no consideration of the obvious heat gain issues throughout the building. The start point of the design was to try and temper this large central space and make into a central hub of activity. The central courtyard has a series of multi level air-conditioned terraces and event spaces. Since the brief specified more than fifty percent of the office spaces to be of a non-workstation format, a street typology was employed to create spaces which look into each other both in plan and in section. The west face of the building has been given a combination of Balinese gardens along with cavity wall construction which buffer the offices on that face from direct heat gain. The building has considerably deep office floor plates. To moderate the scale of these in proportion to the work areas a central art/sculpture gallery has been sandwiched in between creating inner and outer layers of offices. Given the sheer scale of the building, the design of spaces within has been approached with almost a product design attitude. The resultant is the creation of various individual entities placed within a large volume with a degree of coherence by way of the treatment of these spaces. A ceremonial symmetrical landscape pattern was evolved to compliment the monolithic building to take the emphasis off the enormous scale of the spaces. The unusual forty-five degree cant of the building created unruly spaces which have been dealt with by inserting shell like structures into the building camouflaging and integrating scores of large and otherwise unworkable triangular spaces. Other than the various energy and environmental features employed in the interior design, the building as a showcase of artworks of young artists promoted by the company becomes apparent from the lobby onwards with various areas displaying these works and besides its obvious function of a modern day office, it works as an art gallery adaptable to most forms of contemporary expression.