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A Distinctive Façade Sangini House, Surat

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The humble design of the corporate office building of Sangini House is imbued with legacy, contemporary panache, and indispensable workplace wellness.

The architecture and design of Sangini House explore ways in which it can respond to the context and spirit of the heritage in which it stands. This office building for the Sangini group characterizes new strategies for a flexible, column-free office space that creates a new urban venture in the city’s dense business district.

Established in 1984, the Sangini group is a leading construction firm delivering technical excellence in building design for habitats and commercial spaces. The site for their new office building is located at Canal Road. The areas on the Vesu – Canal corridor area are redeveloped and the roads are newly constructed. The scheme is envisioned as an upcoming real-estate epicenter providing a revived infrastructure and a healthy lifestyle for its inhabitants.

Utopia Designs and Urbanscape Architects collaborated for architecture and conceptualized and designed interiors for the eight-storied office building. The project holds significance in urban, environmental, and contextual terms – an upscale design that is inherited from the brand’s values.

An irregular site with mandatory setbacks offered the opportunity of a triangular footprint. Conceptualizing the design as a sculptural manifestation, the initial design ideas were developed as a work of art that would challenge the archetypal structural systems and the notion of a building, while showcasing the ethos of the brand, capability, and expertise in the developer domain. The design intent was to create a dynamic built volume that would encourage the visitor to come into space and the building. As a result, cantilevered floor plates that defy the conventional grid structure with post-tensioned sweeping floors have been cast along with exposed concrete walls that are structural. Bearing in mind the cantilever’s scale, alternate floors have been intentionally connected with sheer walls; resulting in each floor acting as a single beam, with the functions shuffled accordingly. This exercise led to a column/wall-free alternate floor.

The nature of the family business and the resultant hierarchy plays a crucial role in spatial planning and movement, in order to determine the connections and vertical segregation. The family-run business has excelled through the last four decades, making the terminology corporate ‘house’, extremely pertinent. Extending the home into the workspace, a personal, sensitive, and conscious experience is created within the building through the hierarchy of spaces and their interconnectivity. A small floor plate results in its segregation from the vertical core that comprises two lifts and a staircase.

Guided by the building’s unusual design, distinctive profile, and an appropriate orientation adopted through sun path analysis, the environmental strategy exploits the various factors to enable programmatic and functional success. The stone skin with three-dimensional perforations envelopes the core and provides shade from the harsh sunlight of the south and west throughout the day.

The skin wraps around on the fifth and sixth floor to unify the structure and create an inviting and invigorating volume of the five-floor high entrance. The entrance is where the private world of the tower meets the public realm and this soaring light-filled space tones down the scale, making it look proportionate to the floor plate. The voluptuous space of the eight stories structure, transforms visibly into a five-storied structure, a warmer, more approachable, and composed space, therefore, justifying the use of the word ‘House ‘and departing from the overtly used word ‘corporate’.

From the entrance, the visitor is directed along the sweeping skin into a double-height atrium that opens into a court. Daylight is drawn into the various office levels and down through the building via the atrium. The inclusion of ample daylight ensures a clarified and celebrated movement through the building, that provides a physical and psychological balance to the employees. Other active means of energy systems in the building include rainwater harvesting and drip irrigation systems which are used to optimize water consumption, radiant floors, and ventilation systems that cater to the cooling needs. Together with the highly efficient services equipment and systems in the building and the façade design that is integral to the energy strategy, the building aims to achieve a Platinum green rating. The Sangini House stands as a testament to the brand’s values, designed in response to context, heritage, and functionality. A rather distinctively designed building, it is a new-age epitome of urban culture and environmental sensibility.

QUICK FACTS:

Project: Sangini House
Location: Surat, Gujarat
Name of Client: Adarsh Patel
Architecture  Firm: Urbanscape Architects and Utopia Designs

Design Lead (Architecture): Dinesh Panwar and Apurva Desai
Design Team (Architecture): Vipul Nakrani, Urvakhsh Chichgar, Bhavin Swami, Dishant Patel and Suryaveer Patnaik, Mihir
Consultants:
• Structural – Hiren G Desai (Sai Consultants, Surat)
• Façade Stone – Odyssey stone
• Façade Lighting – Lumenatix
 Site Area (sq ft & sq m): 8,300 sq ft & 772 sq mt
 Built-Up Area (sq ft & sq m): 26,749 sq ft & 2,486 sq mt
 Start Date: February 2016
 Completion Date: march 2019
 Photographer: Noughts and Crosses LLP | Andre Fanthome