Inside story

A new corporate office building treats the sun with wary respect: light is welcome, but heat and glare are not. Rrishi Raote finds out how it’s done.

They copied us,” says the office go-to guy, his chest swelling with pride. “They copied us,” says the architect, his face crumpling in irritation. Yes, they did — the neighbours, that is, who picked up the colour scheme of this good-looking new company headquarters building for their own office tower coming up next door.

That shouldn’t trouble anyone, because the red-and-grey colour scheme is all the two buildings have in common. The headquarters of India Glycols Ltd (IGL), designed by Delhi firm Morphogenesis in 2009, under project architect Sanjay Bhardwaj, is a muted, low-rise structure in more or less earthy tones. Its neighbour is a brash, conventional monster in shiny cladding.

Both buildings face the Greater Noida expressway outside Delhi, with its acres of tarmac, and are surrounded by featureless, empty land, partly cultivated but mostly just waiting for the next onslaught of construction activity. In architectural terms, “the context offers nothing”, as Bhardwaj says. So he turned the building inwards. “We tried to make it as solid as possible from the outside, and completely do away with opaque walls on the inside. It’s a strategy derived from traditional forms of architecture.”

Which means: courtyards. The IGL building has four. The largest is the one in the middle. Like its smaller sisters it serves many functions — it is required to look good, its water features help cool the air (creating a ‘microclimate’), ornamental plants and palm trees improve appearance and employees can step into their (limited) shade. Because it is a large courtyard and the building is only three storeys tall, the sun streams in unobstructed. Therefore, no office areas overlook this courtyard; instead, corridors circle the space at each floor level. The actual office spaces with workstations for 250 employees are grouped around the two lesser courtyards on the south side of the building, which are small enough to keep much of the sun out. Thus the building turns its back to the sun, even while letting it in.

And there’s the key. This building is all about energy, heat and light — economising on the first, defeating the second and optimising the third. None is achieved by simply throwing on a roof and turning up the airconditioning.

The solid outer walls not only save the building’s occupants from the boring view, they also act as heat shields. There is a narrow insulation gap in the wall, so heat does not get passed on.

Where there is glass, it is “low-emissivity coated glass”, which, says Bhardwaj, “reduces the amount of sun that comes through”. The outer surface of the glass is coated with a spray that roughens it just enough to scatter the light that bounces off — which means that the windows don’t reflect the glare onto people outside.

The interiors, too, were finetuned to manage light. “Most of the surfaces are light-coloured, so that there is a lot of reflected light,” Bhardwaj says. The result is very neutral interiors, but “That actually gives you the best light for working.” Direct light “adds to the heat load and creates glare”; indirect, ambient light is more comfortable. “Hard [shiny] areas generate a lot of heat,” the architect adds.

The floor plates are just 8 metres wide, which means no part of the main workspaces is far from natural light.

At the top of the building is more insulation: a roof garden, reserved for IGL’s directors and their guests. Lawn grass and low hedges grow in over two feet of soil on the roof. There is also a decorative pool and mist-spray fountains — all of which helps keep the offices below cool.

So IGL’s electricity bill is kept down. For one, almost no artificial lighting is used indoors during the day; indirect sunlight serves most illumination needs. Second, the airconditioning plant need not work as hard. Bhardwaj claims that each ton of AC power cools 220 sq ft of this office, compared to 130-150 sq ft in a conventional building. Given a built-up area of 4 lakh sq ft, the difference is significant.

During Business Standard’s visit to the office, workers were at their workstations; it was a warm day and lunch was over, so the courtyards, canteen, AV room and gym were empty. The 60-seater canteen (which, Bhardwaj says, is now being expanded into a “food court”) overlooks the fourth courtyard, which is really a sunken portion of the main courtyard. The employees often sit outdoors to eat, hold informal meetings or work on laptops: as Bhardwaj says, “It’s got to look nice for our clients, but has to be available for use for different things.”

The client, IGL, is a Rs 1,600 crore (according to its website) petrochemicals company which prides itself on its ‘green’ habits in manufacturing. Its products serve in all sorts of industries, from textiles to packaging, pharmaceuticals, paper, agrochemicals, food processing and more — not obviously environment-friendly sectors, but certainly those where a good example might go a long way.

The last word must go to the occupants — not the directors who enjoy a whole sumptuous floor to themselves, but the junior employees for whom these spaces were chiefly designed. Bhardwaj says he was told by one that “We don’t know how the building works, but one thing we can tell you is we don’t feel tired when we go home.” The office go-to guy told this reporter that employees enjoy watching the lights and cooling mist spray come on in the courtyards in the evenings. “Late-sitting bahut hota hai,” he says: people are happy to work late.