Q: DPA’s design approach for the Asahi Glass corporate office project and the financial firm’s office.
Sonali Bhagwati: We recently did an office for a corporate that makes architectural glass. So, we decided to use architectural glass as a major component in the office. Normally when you come into an office, there is a reception with a back wall that has the company signage or a logo etc. Here, we decided to do a reception with transparent glass at the back where you see a meeting room and the office. It is the transparency of the glass that we have tried to highlight. Glass is about transparency; it’s about accountability. So you interpret glass in terms of breaking down the barriers of hierarchy in an office and try and create this very flat, workable and extremely vibrant workspace, where everybody’s accountable to everybody.
So using the transparency of glass to break the old-world hierarchical barriers while showcasing the product, was the concept adopted for this workspace.
Then we did an office for a finance firm. A finance firm would ideally be very rigid, you know, you find people in white shirts, and black trousers, etc. But this was not like that. This was a bunch of young, vibrant people. So we decided to create this young, vibrant office that exudes energy and vitality.
We followed a completely different design approach.
First of all When we came into the office, there is no reception., it is like coming to a home. So you came in, you came into a living room. There is a coffee machine with cookies and the smell of fresh coffee greets you. A sofa seating with a centre table, throw rug and cushions creates a place where people can sit down in smaller groups and chat. And then there is this large dining table, which became a community table. There are no visual barriers to the expansion of this bustling office.
So when visitor came in, they would just go up to anybody’s desk and ask for the person they would want to meet. So the absence of reception and barriers enabled everybody to just walk in and walk out as they wanted.
And there was this cafeteria, which was like a little Irani cafe. It just had a cast iron railing that demarcated it from the workspace. The flooring was in colourful Portuguese patterned tiles with table tops in stressed wood and metal chandeliers for ambient light.
There was a table tennis table next to it. So, while this was fun and casual, there were screens all over that continuously streamed financial data, which is critical to the work.
We had a false floor that facilitated frequent reconfiguration of teams and grouping of workstations.
For some of the smaller meeting rooms, we just used acoustic curtains, which could be drawn only during private conversations. The rest of the time, it remained as open spaces.
And on those curtains, we got various financial capital’s graphically depicted skylines printed. So one was Shanghai, one was Mumbai, one was New York and London as these are the financial capitals of the world.
We combined esoteric bohemian lighting along with architectural lights. The carpet, too was a patchwork with throw rugs and plenty of social spaces interspersed in the office.
This workspace is in every way as myriad as you can get. It is a completely different typology and was a great experience.
