THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE CHIMES BUILDING, GURGAON

The Chimes Building, Gurgaon has been featured in May' 2014 issue of Journal of Indian Institute of Architects. We reproduce the content here.

Ar Aashish V Karode, B.Arch. MUD (Berkeley), USA

Aashish believes in Architecture that is beautifully functional, ecologically responsible and environmentally sustainable. While he finds his passion in the careful balance of client and end user input, he matches this with an uncompromising dedication to design that elevates the experience of places that he designs. His hands-on project involvement, with his dedication and commitment to sustainable design through elegant and high performance environments are the key to many of the successful projects done by the firm. His core expertise of a strong creative design approach to projects and a practical methodology to finding solutions that fit the client's needs is an essential component that shapes the firm's design philosophy.

With over 20 years of extensive design experience on a number of significant projects, Aashish has led the firm in a variety of works ranging from hospitality, schools, commercial and institutional projects to townships including the Reliance Power Township at Sasan, and Industrial Townships in Odisha and various LEED Gold and Platinum projects that the firm has recently been engaged with.

Ar Sushil L Karer, B.Arch., Institute of Environmental Design

Karer is focused on the role that design plays in creating exciting and stimulating environments that are sustainable over their life cycle and use resources conservatively. He has more than 20 years of experience in architecture, facilities planning, design and concept development of Institutional Architecture and Interior Design in the IT, hospitality, retail and residential sectors and project implementation. His experience and commitment is a complement to Design Atelier's sustainability resume and market focus. Karer adds depth and energy to his team because of which the company has emerged as one of the most highly regarded architectural firms in the country.

JOURNAL OF THE INDIAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS, MAY' 2014

The Architecture of the Chimes Building, Gurgaon is about creating public spaces that are accessible and enable the experience of nature within the spaces of the building, symbolizing life inside the building. The design of the building addresses issues of sustainability, sociability, making room for nature, and programme flexibility. The building mass is specially developed to demonstrate a novel solution for a multi-tenanted office building with floor plate size flexibility to create a mix of tenants from various service sectors and industries. To create a high profile address, it was envisioned to organize each floor as potentially heterogeneous openplan environments. They can be combined or be separated on user requests with controlled indoor environments and amenities to suit a variety of needs for large and small businesses organized to share common community resources set up in the building.

The design of the building emphasizes diversity of all kinds: juxtaposition of people, functions, built forms, spaces. Activities are just some of the fundamental elements that help encourage an inclusive and sustainable public sphere that thrives at all times. The building is raised up from the ground on pilotis, allowing free-flowing open spaces. The building is shaded from the harsh sun, with a variety of water pools and guided streams cooling the air and plants growing within and around the building on the site to cool the ground. A variety of public spaces are created at ground level that are accessible, shaded and close to nature. These spaces encourage serendipitous meetings, foster community engagement and active participation in urban work life.

At the ground, the concept of openness, spaces flowing together, plays a major factor in the design. The public areas including a restaurant/café are located on the ground floor, with smaller spaces to encourage people to meet spontaneously for coffee or for informal meetings. Various spaces for public functions are offered- an open air performing arts theatre, a cafeteria, a future exhibition space and a restaurant. A number of available conference rooms, meeting lounges form a complete sociable and efficient centre for the complex to respond to all nature of business requirements. Sky terraces attached to each floor plate connect to nature.

To maximize the use of green spaces and the views from within and outside and make use of the ground, otherwise lost to building footprint, the design places the gardens around glass-lined movement corridors and staircase cores. The journey path through the spaces of the building, lift lobbies, holding areas, social spaces, cafeteria and reception are located along the way and designed as people places. It suggests the idea of diverse experience of graded light and shaded spaces, landscape variation to include plant and animal life (etched into the stone surfaces), air, earth and water as part of each of the pauses and transition experiences. Visual connections are made through glass courtyards, corridors and lobbies, together with the complex interconnections and interpenetrations of interior spaces, the interplay of light and choices of just a few material finishes. The symbolism of the landscape and the architectural artifact are intended to enliven the whole ensemble.

The form development follows the idea of raising the building on pilotis to relieve the ground and give back the landscape to the ground- creating a sociable and welcoming space of the entrance reception. Reception is a glass cube set in a water garden, using plants as tree cover and water as climate modulators. A variety of water bodies and plants have been provided around and inside the building to cool the ground, and transform it into a space with positive energy, shaded social spaces, and graded light. Open spaces and light wells work as courtyards that relieve the bulk of the form and supply natural light to the inside of the office floor plates.

The floor plates are modular, independently equipped with amenities/ facilities for modern office requirements and can be combined into heterogeneous open plan environments to suit a variety of needs for a mix of large and small businesses sharing common community resources set up in the building. With this profile, the flexibility in floor plate size makes for best possible marketing to create a mix of tenants from various service sectors and industries.

The Façade design is guided by its visibility and response to the street corner, visibility from the surrounding spaces and the main roads and to the climatic considerations of the solar path, natural light penetration and breezes. It is equally about imagining a sensible notion of contemporariness, with formal and material choice that echo the historic form of massive Indian wall making that rejects heat and the high sun, but allows filtered natural light. The North allows light, but rejects reflected heat, the ribbon windows on the west, east and south faces are set high on the floor plate to allow the deeper penetration of a limited amount of the harsher western and southern light, but freely allows internal courtyard reflected light and North light to penetrate the plates through large treated glass surfaces. The heat gain thus reduced is further mitigated by the use of heat reflective paint and the insulated wall section.

A number of strip windows in the otherwise massive walls are used to visually connect the interior and the exterior and is mitigated by the use of anti-dazzle e-glass so people do not lose touch with the natural environment while at work. Outsiders get curious glimpses of light and activity through the façade that activates the otherwise solid building as a place of action.

The architecture is used to develop the building marked by energy efficiency, operational convenience, low operational cost and optimized investment costs. It focuses not only on the façade, sun shading, and lighting details but above all, also on minimizing the energy consumption of the building while optimizing natural light consumption. The building is glazed on the North face and on shaded facades with higher performance glass responsive to the conditions. On exposed and direct heat receiving faces a solar façade of small openings set up high on the floor, allow less direct heat and maximizes penetrations of light into the plate.

The insatiable demand for parking is met by the provision for a double stack parking system, extra capacity preferred parking spaces for car poolers, and parking for the electric shuttle to connect with the future metro nearby. This facilitates an office building without visible cars and frees the ground to landscape and a pleasing outdoor environment.

The building consists four inter connected floor plate blocks of varied size and scale organized around courtyards. These floors are independently equipped with amenities for all modern office requirements.

Project Details
Name of Client : Chimes Group, Athena
Business Solutions
Design Team : Aashish Karode, Prosenjit Banerjee
Site Area : 2 Acres
Built-Up Area : 270,000 sft
Date of Commencement : March 2008
Completion Date : January 2011- 2012 Interiors
Photo Credits : Dileep Prakash, Aashish Karode, Navin Kumar

Japan to Assist India Build 24 Green Cities in Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor

In recent years India has worked to diversify its energy supplies and make its infrastructure ‘greener’. The ambitious Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor project is the largest infrastructure project currently underway in the country. Japan is helping India to build 24 Green Cities in India’s western region. The work in 7 of the 24 green cities has already underway, with Gujarat set to be the first state to undergo an eco upgrade. The green cities project is part of the proposed $90 billion Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor mega-infrastructure project which aims at boosting the economic growth along the about 1500-km-long stretch that joins the most important cities of India, New Delhi and Mumbai.

The objective is to develop green cities which would be planned and executed in a manner that would ensure sustainable growth. These proposed cities would have better transport facilities centered around public transport. The green cities will also have access to optimized power supply and 24-hour water supply. It has also been planned that these cities would also have their own waste and water recycling plants.

Japan is offering its energy-efficient technologies to make these green cities as sustainable as possible. Japan has invested in numerous infrastructure projects in India including the Delhi Metro project. The DMIC project is already underway and will cover six states: Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.

India: Urbanization & Increase in Traffic Congestion

Traffic congestion is a serious problem in most cities of India, with hardly any space for safe pedestrian movement. Even in public transport services like buses and and trains, the public has to struggle for few inch of space as they are overcrowded. The fast urbanization across India including in cities like Chennai (which is the commercial capital of south India) poses a new set of challenge. In Chennai buses carry 30% more passengers every day than the international average and probably because of the inconvenience attached to this overcrowded public, more and more affluent commuters leave the system and buy their own vehicles. And, because of this, there has been a 95% increase in car ownership in Tamil Nadu state.

In Mumbai, according to a study, 44% of the city walks to work, though among the poor, that number jumps to 63%. Here, in Mumbai as well, the ever-increasing number of cars has brought major complications and this goes beyond traffic jams. Poor air quality and a increase in road accidents has put people particularly those who live and work on the roadsides at great risk.

The traffic problem in Delhi is no different and a study make us acquaint to the traffic scenario in the rest of urban India. There were 44 lakh vehicles on Delhi roads in 2004 which will almost double by 2021 when the next Master Plan will be implemented. The road length, however, has not increased proportionately.

In Kolkata, metro rail and Vivekanand Setu were constructed to ease traffic flow. But traffic congestion in several old localities and near Haora bridge remains a daily routine. In Ahmedabad, the speed of vehicles comes down to 5 km/hr on Gandhi Marg and several other roads due to congestion and overcrowding.

The big cities of India, because of the unplanned urbanization and overwhelming increase of vehicles, are almost reached to a state of paralysis. There is a strong need to study and find solution to the problems related to traffic congestion and unmindful urbanization!

Green buildings don’t create happier workers!

A new study coauthored by a UC Berkeley researcher says that occupant satisfaction with LEED-certified office building environments appears to decline with time.

If you thought working in a green building leads to greater satisfaction in the workplace, then it is the time for a rethink! According to a new research from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, workers in LEED’s certified green buildings appear no more satisfied with the quality of their indoor workplace environments than those employed in conventional buildings.

The findings of this new research was published in April issue of the journal Building and Environment and concludes that most workers do not experience a higher level of workplace satisfaction simply because they work in LEED certified buildings. This findings are based on the survey responses of 21,477 individuals in 144 mainly large office buildings, mostly in the United States. Of those buildings, 65 are LEED certified. Occupant satisfaction with LEED-certified office building environments appears to decline with time, with the greatest level of satisfaction reported during the first year that a worker spends in a green building.

Researchers, however, said that these conclusions does not mean green certification is outdated, costly or useless. Green buildings do have positive effect on people health and well-being, climate change and energy security.

Working with Glass

Surface Reporter, India's 1st 'Material-centric' magazine for exterior-interior products & projects, shared the experiences of the veterans in working with glass. The spotlight was on Aashish Karode & Sushil Karer, Principal Architects, Design Atelier who too shared their experiences of working with Glass. Here is excerpt from this feature:

OUR EXPERIENCE WITH GLASS: 

Our design has always endeavored to work with craft, light, air, water, natural environment and technology as if they are materials in the construction of space. The use of glass to delineate the inside allows the exterior or outdoors to seamlessly penetrate the inside spaces becoming one aspect of the “whole” thing. The user are always able to register this as the major move by the architects, that actually enliven the spaces to be more than just rooms, and the form to be way more than just building construction.

CHALLENGES FACED WITH GLASS: 

The use of glass comes with multiple challenges in practice and these are not just about fragility as a material. Constraints of size and transportation, lack of highly specialized converters for operations involving combinations of glass. Lack of specialists with application and process knowledge, Weather resistance, Conversions in specialized applications like underwater, Safety, Deflection and Performance in solar applications are the major challenges we face in practice.

OUR MESSAGE TO GLASS MANUFACTURERS: 

Glass manufacturers could provide clear graphical and numerical information and samples kits for architectural practices. They also need to develop local Application centres where special sizes and special applications can be methodically developed for architectural applications with reasonable costs and time bound project deliveries.

Design Atelier is a well known architecture firm based in New Delhi. Spanning across Architecture, Campus Design and Master planning, Housing, Hospitality, Retail and Workplace Design, the firm has developed around 250 projects till date. Their most notable glass projects include Indian Oil Refinery, Panipat, Athena, Gurgaon, Bhai Twins Corporate Tower, Noida and Lohia Group Corporate Tower.

Shaping Spaces

Design of a retail space now builds consumer loyalty and reflects what the brand stands for, in an environment of convergence of limitless sub-cultures of internet, grand fantasy and face-to-face connections in stores. In an article, published in April' 2014 issue of Retail Today, Aashish Karode ask the consumers to be prepared to find an ultra-futuristic whimsy store with a window display of inspired vintage and romantic furnishings with oversized, backlit chess pieces, rendered in plastic film, within a 2,000 sq-ft hair salon!

Aashish Karode is a principal with Design Atelier Urbis, a New Delhi, India based famous architecture firm. He writes, "We are witnessing far more nontraditional and diverse approaches to design, locations, and offerings being cross-pollinated between various formats of retail. Contrary to glitzy marbles and granites of yesteryears, there is now a co-mingling of high brow and low grade materials - such as marine-grade plywood, raw packing creates and exposed or impressioned concreate. Using these materials showcases rather simplified lightwood interiors to subdue the users with a true feelings of free flow and weightlessness while also combining ultra-luxury high end furniture with display cases made from shipping crates!

Retail stores, according to Aashish, now balance the changing and ever more complex environment of physical stores, online presence, creative calalogues and radical marketing. Not only are there multiple selling streams and real estate spaces to contend with, but there are also the demographic range of their customers who have widely differing aspirations and choices to consider.

Global influences, local context, realty prices and discerning consumers are leading the revolution of design in retail. The drastic changes seen in departmental stores that are becoming boxes to hold several in-stores and pop-up stores, makes brands compete to create their own alluring environments within. Therefore, brands design their own space within a larger shared space! Read full article in Retail Today, April' 2014 issue.

Creating Memorable Hospitality Designs for a Truly Exceptional Guest Experiences

The design for gathering places for leisure and recreation should be memorable because these are the destinations that people return to time and again. A truly exceptional designs not only ensure exceptional guest experiences but also enhance the brand. A memorable guest experience by its definition is not common; it is not typical; it is unusual, if not unique. If two hospitality centres located at cities of two different countries look the same, then the experiences too are not different.

Design Atelier, therefore, believes that each project is a signature design, differentiated by architectural elements, finishes, furnishings, accessories, lighting and art to create style, image and an inviting ambiance. And, a professional interior design should not only ensure that clients have a memorable experience but also makes a positive impact on them. Meaningful, memorable and original experiences influence the way customers perceive a brand (or an organization) and feel about the 'space'. Adding little details together will help designers creating something of far more value than you would without them. These little details motivate customers to come back over and over, pay happily and recommending everyone they know to you.

Designing and creating big is easy and everyone can do it, but it is concentrating over little details that differentiate one space from another and that influence customers to choose one over the other. Attentiveness cost nothing, nor do personalization and consideration.

Design Atelier creates interior environments as memorable experiences, with original, personal & thoughtful design aesthetics.

Design Atelier at channel IndiaNOMY

It was nice to discover that channel IndiaNOMY at YouTube has shared videos of some of our projects and activities. We are sharing few of them over here:

The Psychology of colors in Architecture Designs

Faber Birren, who is the considered the father of applied color psychology, once proclaimed: “The study of color is essentially a mental and psychological science, for the term color itself refers to sensation." No can disagree with the fact that color is an integral element of our world, not just in the natural environment but also in the man-made architectural environment. The role of colors in an architectural design are not (or should not be) limited to decoration alone, psychological influence (or what would be) of colors should be considered. 

Studies have proved that the reaction of humans in any of the architectural environment is to a large percentage is based on the sensory perception of color. The human response to color is total - it influences human beings psychologically and physiologically. The color designer involved in architectural process must understand how the reception of visual stimulation will process and evoke responses thereby creating best possibilities for the welfare of human beings. This is important because the psychology of colors play different tasks and function in different units such as hospitals, offices, production units & factories, educational institutes, homes for the elderly, correctional facilities, and so on. A classroom has a different function than a hospital ward; an office space is not a factory, etc.

What colors say?

Pastel yellow conveys the impression of Soft, sunny and friendly vibes. The interior space with this color is stimulating, brightness, coziness.

Red is arousing, passionate, fiery and aggressive. Therefore the message red conveys in the interior too is advancing, dominant and aggressive.

Green is balancing, natural, calm with the message of simplicity, security, balance.

The white being open, vast, neutral and sterile gives the message of purity, sterile, emptiness, and indecisiveness.

How to Make an Existing Building Green

There are ways to make your existing building 'green' without making major structural changes. One can take steps to reduce environmental impact by effectively managing the way a building uses water and energy. The mantra is - 'start with small changes, which can add up to a big impact'. Here are few steps one can take to make an existing building go green:

First thing you can do is to change existing light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs, which use up to 75 percent less power. It is also green idea to put lights on a timer so they automatically shut off at night or when you are away. Make sure all building's lighting uses energy efficiently. You should also ensure that your heating and cooling systems are maintained regularly so they use energy efficiently and last longer.

Ensure your building is well insulated. This would prevent wastage of energy on heating or cooling. Similarly, there are numerous ways, which we all know, to reduce our building's electricity use. Put them to practice. 

Do not waste water. By fixing tiny issues one can not only preserve water but also save money. Use dual-flush toilets. Fix leaks and replace your existing fixtures with low-flow options. According to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, low-flow shower heads save over 7 gallons per minute!