How (and Why) India Built the World’s Biggest Office

It's time for a quick quiz: which structure has more than 7 million square feet of

office

space and houses nearly 70,000 workers and ranks as the largest

office

building in the

world

. If you guess the Pentagon, then you are wrong. In November 2023, the title of the

world

's largest office was taken from the pomac industrial estate and given to this gigantic new development in the Indian city of Sarat, thousands of offices, 10,000 square meters of restaurants and cafes, parking for 5,000 cars and With 10,000 motorcycles, 131 elevators, nine Courtyard Gardens retail outlets and conference halls all

built

across this 35-acre high-security complex, a structure of this size is a true milestone for the Indian construction industry. and with a long list of specialized requirements and a pandemic to navigate to build, it was no easy task in an era of hybrid work where office buildings sit empty.

Around the world, this huge building had guaranteed full occupancy before a single piece of rebar was placed. So who could need such a big building? This is the story of how and why India

built

the world's largest office, but diamonds are a girl's best friend. I have ever bought a diamond or been lucky enough to be given one as a gift. Most likely it came through here. This is Sarat, in the Garat state of western India, where a whopping 90% of the world's diamonds are cut and polished, but it is as big as this industry. is for the city that has a problem The raw stones arrive in Sarat, where they are processed in one of the thousands of small workshops spread across the city, most of the finished products are then collected by traders who travel to Mumbai, more 200 km away, where the diamonds are found. are marketed and shipped all over the world, it's not exactly efficient and it would be much better for everyone if the entire business could be carried out in one city or indeed one building, which is why a group of almost 5,000 was brought together Diamond companies in the city. to form the sdb satat Diamond Boss and this is what they commissioned.

This massive $388 million building was designed to house the entire Indian diamond industry. Under one roof i.e. Saratz cutters and polishers and Mumbai traders and traders. 4,700 offices housing 67,000 people, but where Even if you start designing a building of this size, do you opt for a skyscraper? Well, the problem with this is that with such a large volume of people coming and going through a relatively small space, it's a really inefficient way of managing the flow of people, also because the sdb is organized along guild lines. , all the companies he represents have the same status, so anything resembling a hierarchy is out of the picture, what about a huge office block?

Well, there you might run into the problem of which lights each office needs access to. daylight which is the best quality for viewing diamonds so anything with a deep floor plan is no good, how about a large donut? Well, there you have the problem that anything too good, any office facing east or west would be directly attacked. Sunlight forces anyone inside to draw the blinds and turn on the light switch, so let's recap, it must be large enough to support the flow of tens of thousands of people and have perfectly consistent lighting conditions throughout. the floors, and be able to bear it.

Sarat, the stifling humid heat and the monsoon rain, that is the challenge that was presented to the architects most for Genesis. They began by addressing the large number of people the building had to serve. We've never come to anything like this before and we look at this and wonder how. Are we going to get people in and out of a 7 million square foot building? They will all come in within an hour in the morning and they will all leave within an hour. The night to deal with this, the architects set a goal that any employee could get to their office within 7 minutes of entering the Gat, so we started thinking about it inside out and did a lot of traffic simulations and security simulations of what that structure would be like. and it turned out to be this kind of fish type plan Bor vertebra which of course is a very efficient way of distributing nerve signals from the brain to the rest of the body.

It is a very efficient method in nature. Nine 15-story towers flank a 400-meter central column. In addition to speeding up access by aligning the building from north to south, it also solved the complicated problem of lighting, so the heights of each of those tars and the distances between them that are connected by the column. The spaces between them are calculated so that the office at the bottom also obtains 100% lighting and is not overshadowed. The backbone of the building also helps to cope with extreme weather. Each end widens to catch the prevailing winds that are channeled through the complex. and providing 50% of the building's cooling needs.

Common spaces in the spine and courtyards are also essential to creating the environment that diamond traders are accustomed to. Traders don't actually sit in the room. conferences carry these diamonds in small packets in their pockets and sit under a tree. I have a cup of tea and the exchange is done, so that's the design, but how the hell do you build something that big? After construction began in December 2017, 6,000 people were needed. It took 4 and a half years to build this gigantic building, but the

biggest

challenge faced was undoubtedly during Covid. As global supply chains became depleted, the large quantities of materials needed to continue construction had to be sourced much closer to home, we said localized all materials only.

The materials found within a 500 km radius that we can access the roofs were manufactured in a nearby place called Morby. We designed and built a manufacturing plant on site to make the unitized glazing, so only raw glass would come. It came from a nearby factory and this on-site plant was manufacturing fully unitized units as large as the sdb. This is just the first phase of an even larger Plan called Dream City, a 7 square kilometer smart city providing even more housing and offices. for the diamond industry, but this future may not be so bright, the global economic crisis along with the Ukraine war hit the heart of the jewelry market earlier this year, 20,000 people in the industry lost their jobs due to a fallen feature, but regardless of what happens to the broader economy, this building has already taken on a life of its own and become an iconic structure for a proud public.

It has brought the conversation about architecture into everyday life, which was not really the case in India. We see that it began to promote the tourism that people want. to visit it I want to go and study it, I mean, now you can, you know, call a tour operator and they have sura Diamond boss is one of the things you should go and, uh, go visit, I think after two years of pandemic, all. More or less, I think it's like giving people a symbol, not just a vision, so I think in some ways it's been really good, don't forget we're inspiring the next generation of builders through our investment in loans of bricks. a fantastic Lego subscription service.

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