Design Atelier

Architecture of the Chimes Building is about creating public spaces that are accessible and enable the experience of nature within the spaces of the building, symbolizing life inside the building. The design of the building addresses issues of sustainability, sociability, making room for nature, and program flexibility. The building mass is specially developed to demonstrate a novel solution for a multi-tenanted office building with floor plate size flexibility to create a mix of tenants from various service sectors and industries. To create a high profile address, it was envisioned to organize each floor as potentially heterogeneous open-plan environments that can be combined or be separated by user requests with controlled indoor environments and amenities to suit a variety of needs for large and small businesses organized to share common community resources set up in the building. The architecture aims to create a sociable work environment that encourages serendipitous meetings, and friendships beyond narrow domestic boundaries. The design places the gardens and corridors around movement cores, and the building envelope thus evolves as a series of linear blocks placed obliquely to the sun and the street. This maximizes the use of green spaces and the views from within and outside and makes use of the ground, otherwise lost to building footprint. The building is provided with a conjoined series of service cores and floor plates of varied sizes that allow flexibility and allowing it to remain a sustainable structure for its life span. The idea is to make a series of flexible floor plates for tenant use above the pilotis that respond to the space requirements of a diverse clientele of both large and small businesses that have an appreciation of the diversity of the settings in the buildings. The position of the sky terraces and solar facades are a complex integration of the whole idea achieved through the material, technology and insulating properties of the shell, oriented to climatic advantage. Visual connections are made through glass courtyards, corridors, and lobbies, together with the complex interconnections and interpenetrations of interior spaces, the interplay of light and choices of just a few material finishes. The symbolism of the landscape and the architectural artifact are intended to enliven the whole ensemble. The form development follows the idea of raising the building on pilotis to relieve the ground and give back the landscape to the ground- creating a sociable and welcoming space of the entrance reception- a glass cube set in a water garden, using plants as tree cover and water as climate modulators. A variety of water bodies and plants growing around the and inside the building to cool the ground, and transform it into a space with positive energy, shaded social spaces, and graded light, open spaces and light wells working as courtyards that relieve the bulk of the form and supply natural light to the inside of the office floor plates. The Solar Façade is a significant and a “signifying” building enclosure that follows specific functional requirements and carries efficient supply systems for the “machine”. Its dimensions, proportions and scale are not just dictated by the guidelines of customary municipal law. The Façade design is guided by its visibility and response to the street corner, visibility from the surrounding spaces and the main roads and to the climatic considerations of the solar path, Natural Light penetration and Breezes. The Faceted Plan form orientation allows self-shading from the South and West and has larger surfaces on the benign directions of the North and East. It recesses from the street corner allowing sight lines, and shows the building “in the round”. The form also creates green areas and landscape opportunities that are accessible to groups of users. The offices occupy six upper levels, and as a novel solution for a multi-tenanted office building. The Floor Plans consist of four interconnected floor plate blocks of varied size and scale organized around climate modifying, natural light giving courtyards.