In Hyderabad’s dry, hot climate, the vast majority of office goers are resigned to spend their entire day within the confines of an air conditioned space with very little access to fresh air from the outdoors. Hyderabad a once laid back town is now a competitive cosmopolitan city, attracting many big-tech companies, who build millions of square feet of office space per year. Very few of these new structures consider local climate and culture conditions in their design. Most of these new office buildings are sealed-off glass boxes that rely heavily on air conditioning to maintain a specific indoor temperature consistently throughout the year, whatever weather fluctuations Hyderabad’s seasons might bring: hot summers, pleasant monsoons, and tolerable winters. This building paradigm, mechanically controlled and indifferent to context, perpetuates a corporate office typology that first emerged post-WWII in North America, and which soon spread to anywhere hoping to participate in the new high-speed world economy.
Intention and identity were the two challenges presented to design experiment When asked to renovate an old building for a chit funds office. The intention of the company was clear, to instill confidence in the chit funds offices’ potential customers. The chit funds industry has been fraught with scandals, from owners shutting shop abruptly, to refusing to pay up to its customers, so the architects came up with a novel way to propagate trust amongst its patrons. A simple design intervention in terms of installing a large continuous scrolling LED strip, broadcasting how much the company paid out to its customers that week. The designers felt that, by increasing such evident transparency, it would be possible to earn the trust of its patrons.
A charity school that had been run by a zakah-funded, not-for-profit educational trust for the last six years finally required a building. The site is located on a hill top, in the unplanned settlement within the walls of the majestic Golconda fort in Hyderabad. This school had been functioning out of a large shed with partitions to create classrooms. The project was riddled with multiple challenges. Since the school is run solely based on individual donations, the budget was extremely tight. Material choices had to be economical as well as durable. The ensemble team working on the project was mostly devoting time on a pro bono or non-profit basis. The site is highly contoured and covered with sheet rock and boulders (a topographic trait of the Deccan Plateau) buried under a blanket of garbage piled on over decades. Articulating the peculiar and difficult topography of the site and its surrounds posed a major challenge: due to proximity to heritage structures and dense urban context, most of which is residential, blasting the rock was not an option, and other methods were not affordable. There is also a height restriction in the Heritage Zone.
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