ValueLabs

This head office of a software company is a dense development that had to fit 1500 persons on a 1.75 acre site. Vastu (an Indian traditional belief, equivalent to Feng Shui) stipulated that the building be a square with no offsets and projections, and building codes constrained a four floor height limit. The design challenge was to transcend these constraints to provide a sense of scale and community. The project was scaled down by breaking the mass into four quadrants, each containing day-lit office areas wrapped around central sky-lit atriums. This scaled the workforce into smaller teams that still belong to the larger whole. The larger sense of “campus” is infused by the creation of a multi-volume staircase spine cutting through all levels, forming a community “street” where one would encounter the “whole: company. Large skylights, glassed conference rooms, and lift foyers span across this street giving it an outdoor urban feel. The outer surface presents a lightweight Mondrian-like grid of glass and aluminum that interweaves with solid masses in order to break the sense of a box.

The project won a Special Mention under the category of Public/Institutional Buildings in the Architecture+Design & Spectrum Foundation Awards 2007.  It has also been covered in the business newspaper Mint as a paradigm for designing to reflect the community structure of the workplace.