Location: Bandra Kurla, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Architect: James Law Cybertecture
Built Area– 33,000 sq.m
Parking– 400 cars
If a designer was to track the progress of architecture through the diverse art movements documented and lost through the years, the effluent phases would be far too many to consider. Though they all have confluences at times, there has been a core marking progress- technology.
The journey of built form has culminated at this stage where technology might not just be a fad, but a solution to the problems that have resulted from the built form. Cybertecture- a grassroots by James Law, shows promising incentives for change.
Mumbai is a dense smorgasbord of various textures, layers that are far too complex to understand how a city of this scale is functioning. Having gained notorious fame for real estate costs and the resulting density of the metropolis soaring, Law and associates have a proposal for a design that might be a symbol of change densely built cities might want to adopt.
The integration of adaptive building systems that progressively learn the environment and activities within the structure might be exactly what office buildings need. However, it is possible that the idea of an office building has to be rethought, employees using cloud and online servers for tasks, making a large structure for collective gathering seem redundant. On the other hand, intelligent systems like this can be adapted to make more buildings save energy.
The Cybertecture Egg is an office building ‘synthesized biosphere’, which takes the horizontal slabs of the traditional office building and encases the same in a diagrid exoskeleton of glass and steel. Making it a high-performance net-zero energy building, the structure reuses greywater for landscaping, BIM to minimize energy use, sensors for performance control, and many more features that spell towards a sustainable existence.
Planted between slabs will also be “sky gardens”, for shading and cooling the structure overall, creating a wetland for the mini-biosphere. Solar panels and photovoltaic cells have been integrated into the exoskeleton to absorb latent energy. This makes sure the 33,000 sq.m of office space can use available energy, thereby reducing the carbon footprint.
