Ar. Vikas Dilawari has won a prestigious award for refurbishing a 36,000-sq-ft heritage building, which came up soon after the last global pandemic – the Spanish Flu – and reflected the common and unifying façades of the city then.
His effort at restoring the 96-year-old Commissariat building at Fort – one of the multi-tenanted commercial buildings – was declared structurally unsafe not too long ago. This building has earned Dilawari the first prize at Housing Urban Development Corporation’s Design Awards 2020-2021, reinstating the architect’s long-standing belief in the endangered heritage dictum: “Repair, don’t redevelop”.
Built in 1925 in the Renaissance Revival style, the Commissariat building stands at the junction of the busy Dr DN Road and R Dadaji Street. It boasts the trademark pedestrian arcade on the ground floor, which became the unifying factor for all the buildings that came up here after the demolition of the Fort walls in the 1860s.
Erected between 1890 and 1910, these buildings on the then Hornby Road were used as commercial head offices of banks and insurance companies.
