Workscape 2.0
eiling fan languidly rearranging the stuffy air, tiffin box in a corner, large, shiny, black rotary dial telephone, call bell to summon an orderly to dust the photograph of Mahatma Gandhi. This pretty much sums up the office room of the top Indian executives of about half a century ago. Today’s CEOs work in far swankier surrounds, with state-of-the-art communication facilities, expensive art on the walls, plush carpets and flat panel television screens.
Even so, by international standards, the Indian workplace still has a long way to go. Moving down from the chairman’s suite, you’re far likelier to find uncomfortable, poorly designed, unergonomic office spaces, where movement is severely inhibited, where air-conditioning struggles to keep up or overdoes it, where modern technology is force-fitted to architecture from a different era. And then feudal mind-sets find themselves reflecting in things like office furniture — the lower ranks making do with spondylitis-inducing chairs while the brass recline in spine-supporting splendour — and parking spaces, where the convenience of a few, usually the decision-makers, is more important than the productivity of many.
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Image: Murat Taner/Corbis
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The Bank of China | |
As the Indian economy grows and opens out to the world, our offices have been evolving. A handful of modern workplaces — the ICICI Bank headquarters in Mumbai or the SAP Labs office in Bangalore — incorporate ground-breaking techniques to make the work environment pleasant and invigorating for the average executive. But they remain exceptions rather than the norm; futuristic offices as a trend are yet to go mainstream.
Here’s the thing. People are used to their offices being better than their homes. And we’re now living in increasing comfort. “People are getting used to plush homes,” says Surendra Hiranandani, co-founder of the Hiranandani group, known for its upscale residential townships. “Naturally, their expectation from workplaces will only get more demanding.”
Indications are that India is about to see a wave of property innovations that will bring workplace architecture to global standards. In some ways, we are where the United States was in the early 20th Century (when the Empire State Building came up) or the United Kingdom in the late 1980s (when the unfashionable old docklands were transformed into today’s swank Canary Wharf business district).
In the commercial capital of Mumbai, where five out of every ten truly rich indians live, and where 40 percent of the country’s tax revenues come from, land is getting increasingly scarce.
Over the last decade-and-a-bit, a marshy piece of land on the banks of the smelly Mithi river was developed and is now the Bandra-Kurla Complex (BKC). Lined with more glass frontage than any other part of the country, it is well on its way to become the city’s — and therefore the country’s — financial nerve centre.
In the middle of BKC, a building is coming up. It’s not particularly impressive (a mere 12 storeys) on the surface, but it is a preview of what India’s offices are going to look like in the future. When completed, The Capital — that is its modest name — will have five floors of automated unerground parking for 1,000 cars, a three-level “sky lobby,” a 200 sq.ft. video screen on the facade, climate sensitive glass and many other features that promise a completely new experience.
All at a price tag of over Rs 1,610 crore, the highest for any single building so far in the country.
The Capital is not a bolt from the blue. Over the last two years, real estate firms have announced high tech projects in the heart of the city, its former mills area, which promise to change the business landscape. And in unfashionable Wadala, a 100-storey building is being conceived, in what is the first indication that vast docklands on the East of the island city may soon join the mela.
Eleven years ago, when ICICI built its blue-glass tower in BKC, real estate consultants called the building extravagant and outlandish. It was inefficient, they said, because it did not make good use of the available space to cram more people in. Today, its look has been replicated in a number of buildings in the area and ICICI Towers is lost among them.
Times are different today. Corporate groups like the Tata, Birla, Jindal, Essar, airline companies like Jet Airways, have grown several times their size in the last six years. The Jindals have already bought a large piece of land in BKC to construct their future headquarters. Jet Airways too had booked a place but gave it up after his business hit too many bumps. India’s largest company, Reliance Industries, has bought a large swathe of BKC to construct a convention centre; it also owns the garden in front of The Capital. It plans to build an underground parking lot there.
Seen againts this background, The Capital’s timing is important.
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