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Architects: The Crossboundaries
- Area: 11468 ft²
- Year: 2020
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Photographs:Cross Clicks
Text description provided by the architects. There are some buildings which are timeless, and some which continue to live across time through multiple uses and after-lives.
In designing the interior and space for the corporate offices of Alembic Real Estate, Vadodara, The Crossboundaries took an opportunity to give the interiors of a 55 year old large industrial building its second life. The site for the Alembic Real Estate office is set in the vast 200 acre Alembic Group campus which is being redeveloped and upgraded as a walkable and sustainable mixed use development called Alembic City. Here, a defunct distillery is now revived as an impressive art gallery, and deserted quadrangles come alive to evenings of music and public life.
A range of other interventions to bring forth tasteful art and music event spaces, a skate park and F&B experiences around various industrial and factory spaces of the campus are parallelly planned and moving forward in the Art District. Massive facilities of boilers, sheds, storages, distillation plants that once processed pharmaceuticals and chemical material now become potential spaces to hold an alchemy of public interventions. With this background and a glorious history as a leading industry and multi-generation company, the clients, Alembic Group, sought a sensitive approach along with a progressive outlook for the Real Estate office headquarters.
In dealing with the delicate context and rich legacy of the site set in the century-old industrial campus simultaneously undergoing adaptive reuse program, the designers at The Crossboundaries took balanced steps.
Between keeping intact the integrity of a historic space, and striving for impeccable excellence in workspace design; and from working with a bare, blank canvas of industrial proportions to ensuring minimum damage to its skin, the design needed to bridge many gaps and cross many boundaries. Essentially a large voluminous space, with 12 foot high ceilings, and a grid of massive concrete columns with tapered caps, the site offers itself along with its historic character.