▼项目概览，general view © Vivek Eadara Photography

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.

Tasked with repurposing an existing concrete framed structure on-site into an Auto dealership office headquarter, we focused on design elements that could optimize the building’s climate responsiveness [ in ways overlooked by the original design.] To this end, we built on our practice’s ongoing research into perforated screens as a way to blur the boundaries between inside and outside. Here, a system of screens rhythmically placed on the 1st, 3rd and a future 5th envelops the building. A 3mm metal sheet with 8mm perforations, held together by a well integrated metal frame, make up the screening system.