For a multinational firm with offices in the USA, Canada and India, a workspace that facilitates collaboration is important, especially when a majority of the employees are sprightly, youthful twenty-somethings. With this brief in mind, Usine Studio‘s principal architects, Jiten Tosar and Yatin Kavaiya fashioned an eclectic office for APIDEL in Vadodara.
Interestingly, the tech firm’s India office follows the same working hours as its western counterparts— resulting in a 6pm to 4am workday. Although this came with advantages, such as avoiding the agonising heat and traffic during the day, it also meant that the space would be completely devoid of natural light, resulting in a unique design predicament.
“Since the spaces were not going to experience any natural light, we aimed to replicate the diurnal variations through different qualities of artificial lights,” recalls Jiten Tosar, while discussing how they designed the spaces for optimum user comfort with a combination of hard and soft lighting. The rest of the workspace is a combination of unique colour palettes, interspersed with plants. The formal spaces feature austere browns and greys with pops of yellow, while the more informal ones are decorated with vivid hues and patterns.
Upon entering the space, one finds themselves in a reception area with a ceiling of metal grating painted in a quirky yet formal combination of yellow and grey. The grating imparts a weightless, porous feel, while efficiently concealing the services within it. A mustard yellow sofa faces a wall featuring a graphic depiction of the company profile, surrounding a television screen (for added momentum.) This is accompanied by a couple of interviewing cabins—clean glass cubicles outlined with a slim, black frame.
All the work stations have wooden tops to minimise the reflected glare from the task as well as regular work lights. The longest wall showcases a depiction of the skylines of the USA, Canada, and India by artist Dixit Panchal, which vividly reflects the artificial light. Four open workstations complement a small meeting room with full-length windows that run along the entire façade and a portion of the glass ceiling.
The MD’s cabin, constructed a foot higher than the rest of the floor plan for visual reach across the office, also features stunning views of the city skyline. Moving forward, one reaches the informal team lounge and the smoking zone, divided by a glass painting of a human form receding into the abyss. The lounge is adorned with large, colourful floor cushions on turf carpeting, while the smoker’s den features two brown upholstered chairs. These two spaces protrude as lit up glass masses into the twilight sky, creating a striking visual play of partial reflections and colours.
Finally, a semi-open seating area overlooks a patch of green terrace lawn that opens into a fresh burst of colour, in the form of a 30’X8’ canvas painting, also by Dixit Panchal, and a set of cozy lounge chairs in cobalt blue; the APIDEL colour.
