Mondeal Heights Office and Commercial Building / Blocher Blocher India Pvt. Ltd.
Text description provided by the architects. Blocher Partners India, the architects and interior designers behind the highly praised Mondeal Square complex built a further landmark in Ahmedabad, Gujarat: Mondeal Heights, a multifunctional high-end ensemble for business and leisure on 65,000 square meters. A project that integrates itself perfectly within the cityscape.
Road users and passers-by sense what is already one of Ahmedabad’s most iconic twin towers every day. For Hartmut Wurster, Country Head at the architectural office Blocher Partners India, something extraordinary has been created: “The exclusive mix of urban structure and top technological standards provides a haven for India’s modern business world.” The 70-meter-high towers house generous office spaces, conference rooms, and an exclusive clubhouse with fitness center and spa areas. The buildings themselves play with interwoven and shifted elements, which celebrate an urban dynamism. The façade is a grid of open, semi-transparent, and closed rectangles. Hartmut Wurster explains: “Depending on the time of day, the sun casts different shadows on the building envelopes, with an enlivening effect,” and adds: “Seen from afar, the multi-faceted design broadcasts noble exclusivity.” Mondeal Heights is a business center of international standing, adding a new accent to the aspiring metropolis.
Local architects with a global background – “Architecture,” says the Country Head, “is always influencing the character of a city and, simultaneously, an echo of a social movement. Some projects even have a guiding function besides their actual purpose. They stand for a departure, an evolution, a paradigm shift.” The buildings of blocher partners in India always form a harmonious unit with their surroundings; simultaneously, they radiate self-confident individuality. Founded in 1989 by Jutta and Dieter Blocher in Germany, the company responded to the growing requests from Asia with the foundation of a subsidiary company in Delhi. Especially for the Indian clients, it was important to have an office on location. The special competence of the architectural group is the interlocking of structural design and interior design. Any other architectural firm hardly reaches this holistic approach. “We are convinced that such a one-stop concept is the best solution for companies because all areas fit together like the parts of a puzzle,” explains Angela Kreutz, responsible at blocher partners for the Indian market. To stay true to their own demands, the 17-headed team of the Ahmedabad branch office never stands still. “We are always up to date regarding current developments and trends. Therefore, we travel to the world’s most interesting hotspots to be close to the action,” Mrs. Kreutz says.
Ahmedabad has quickly become a second home for the Indian team. Also, thanks to HN Safal, one of the long-time, loyal clients that stand behind visionary real estate like the breathtakingly beautiful Mondeal Square, the one-of-a-kind Mondeal Retail Park – and now also Mondeal Heights. “The close connections led us to lay more emphasis on Gujarat and especially on the city where we feel at home – Ahmedabad,” Hartmut Wurster, Country Head, explains. Blocher Partners India moved to the metropolis in 2009 – and incorporated their office into a self-planned architectural masterpiece: Mondeal Square. A striking building ensemble that – amongst other highlights –boasts India’s largest media façade. “From our office, I sometimes look over the city and think: there are so many more ventures waiting for us down there,” Wurster describes his unbridled ambition to beautify the city with unique buildings.
Blocher Partners India belongs to the most successful architectural offices of our time. But what are their plans for the years to come? The answer is simple: to be where their clients are, accomplish their wishes, and realize their visions. “We will continue to offer our clients the highest quality and sophisticated aesthetics,” Angela Kreutz explains. “Furthermore, our journey through India has just begun. Surely, many exciting tasks are waiting for us.”
ondon’s volatile and expensive private lettings market is drawing investors into commercial property, according to fresh research in the £1.8 trillion sector.
Leases for shops and offices can often be longer and the turnover of tenants is lower, making the commercial property look appealing a difficult time for the housing market. Landlords and tenants are adjusting to the end of cheap mortgages, after 14 consecutive Bank of England rate hikes took interest rates to 5.25% from 0.25% in December 2021.
A mix of residential and commercial property can help offset some of the risk for in the property market. Meanwhile, demand for office and shop space is on the up, adding to the appeal.
Findings from the specialist financial services firm Shawbrook – seen exclusively by the Standard – show almost a third of landlords in the capital intending to add to their portfolio are considering making the switch.
Retail space is in the lead, with 39% of those looking at commercial property thinking of buying larger shops. That’s narrowly ahead of those looking at smaller shops, at 38%. Office space is just behind that at 37%, with industrial space behind at 29%.
As the appeal of commercial property investment rises, investors already in the industry are planning to expand, with over a third considering upping their portfolios.
The rise of hybrid working is also playing a role, increasing demand for office space, with a rise in businesses wanting premises outside traditional centres, even as the return to work gathers pace.
Emma Cox, head of real estate at Shawbrook, said: “As cities and towns adapt to changing post-pandemic dynamics, people are once again frequenting local businesses and returning to offices.
“When compared to residential properties, commercial properties often feature longer term leases at higher rental yields. Commercial property is a diverse market including a range of industrial, office and retail properties with different dynamics.”
The research also found that landlords were keen to use commercial property as chance to support the local community. The investors keen to buy into shops saw the move as a chance to help the evolution of the high street after the pandemic, with a rise in tenancies from local, independent, and experiential stores.
“Landlords could become the unsung heroes of the high street, with many planning to support their local communities by injecting new life into commercial properties and retail units, added Cox.
AIA East Gateway Commercial & Offices Building / Creative Crews
Text description provided by the architects. Bangna, a district in Bangkok known for its highways, is now emerging as a key logistic corridor to the Eastern Economic Corridor of Thailand. AIA East Gateway is the first workplace project to transform Bangna from mundane office towers along dusty roads into a vibrant, active, and friendly work environment.
AIA East Gateway was designed and developed to challenge the conventional office tower model, where people enter through a grand but empty plaza, wait for elevators, and work in bland cubicles. Here, people are welcomed by a water garden, a large bio-retention pond that regulates water levels to prevent flooding in the area and promotes biodiversity. Stormwater is collected and filtered through green roofs and bioswales. The water garden is especially important in this project, as Bangna is below sea level and prone to floods during the rainy season. The proposal combines functionality and aesthetics in one design.
There has been a question if high-density office towers are still relevant in the post-pandemic era when many have adopted work-from-home arrangements. Creative Crews and our clients believe that social interaction and community are essential for enhancing teamwork and productivity. As the drawbacks of working from home become apparent, such as lack of personal space and blurred boundaries between work and life, we reaffirm our conviction that a proper working environment is still needed in today’s society. Moreover, a higher-density workplace allows for sharing an efficient energy system in the building, compared to individual household energy consumption, similar to mass transportation. Together, people can achieve their team goals faster than working individually without communication, just like taking public transport instead of driving their own cars.
The AIA East Gateway building envelope features insulated glass to reduce heat transfer and energy consumption. The sun-shading fins are designed with varying lengths according to the orientation of the building, creating a dynamic facade that enhances the tower massing. The tower massing is shaped to highlight the gaps where sky gardens are located on different floors, creating a spiral effect leading to the tower’s top.
The workplace design aims to attract people back to the office by offering a more hospitable environment than before. The pandemic has changed the workstyle permanently, requiring more flexible and collaborative spaces. The design also promotes a healthy and active lifestyle by integrating exercise spaces, a swimming pool, a jogging track, and biophilic design elements. Edible gardens, landscape trails for walking meetings, and landscape steps for informal gatherings or relaxation are some features that make this office building a new-generation workplace.
This project sets a precedent for densification in the Bangna area, demonstrating how a future workplace can be designed with sustainability, wellness, and innovation in mind.
The new $1b PwC Tower at Commercial Bay. Photo / supplied
More Aucklanders are back at their offices five days a week in a trend dubbed “work from work” by New Zealand’s largest commercial listed landlord.
Scott Pritchard, chief executive of multi-billion dollar landlord Precinct Properties,
Construction of new six-star rated offices for around 1400 Beca staff leaving Pitt St for the downtown waterfront Wynyard Quayside has reached level four of eight levels.
Scott Pritchard, chief executive of Precinct Properties –
Coeru Shibuya Offices and Commercial Building / Maeda Corporation
Text description provided by the architects. While the demand for timber materials for building construction has been increasing for recent years, Maeda Corporation and Holzstr in collaboration have developed Timber-Steel Hybrid structural brace “Mokkou-Kumiko.” This structure binds a steel plate by exposed red pine wood unitizing it into a lattice system that takes advantage of both toughness of compression by wood, and its tension by steel making high seismic resistance.
This structural system has been applied for COERU SHIBUYA for the first time, as the first project of the COERU series that tries to break the boundary between office and commercial facilities responding to diverse demands expected in coming years. In this project, the hybrid lattice system was uniquely applied for two of its façades in a highly visible way, facing vibrant front streets in Shibuya, appealing to its use of exposed wood to high-rise buildings in a largely urban setting.
The exposed wood of the lattice system can be seen from both inside and outside without any steel bolt or gusset plate on its surface completely wrapping its steel axis by wood giving organic sense to its interior and exterior space. The second means that makes wooden material a part of the building structural system is the Timber hybrid beam in which steel beams are covered by timber masses. In case of fire, a certain depth from the surface of timber masses is intended to be carbonized layer to stop the combustion of the structural member and protect the steel beam inside.
Those timber-steel hybrid beams are applied to the structure above the 10th floor, and it is also structurally calculable in the same way as steel structure. To be more environmentally friendly and sustainable, this project is supposed to use recyclable electricity pursuing the global environmental standard “RE100” with that corporation trying to use only recyclable electricity for their corporation activities. All the attempt to pursue sustainability in this relatively compact-scale building is intended to lead to more environmentally friendly urban projects.
151 Toorak Road Commercial and Office Building / Bird de la Coeur Architects
Text description provided by the architects. 151 Toorak Road is a 6-story office building with a ground-floor restaurant occupying the corner of Darling Street on a restricted site in an inner-city suburb of Melbourne. It responds to its heritage neighbors with an innovative Flex Brick second-skin facade over a traditional brickwork base. The design is drawn from careful analysis of the brick patterning on the former 1890s South Yarra Post Office opposite, coupled with the need to protect the west facade from heat load, while maintaining views.
The South Yarra Post Office, designed by Public Works Department Architect AJ McDonald is one of a rare group of buildings that epitomizes the late nineteenth-century movement to evolve an Australian style in architecture by combining Australian and art nouveau decorative motifs with American Romanesque, Scottish baronial forms. It is a 3-story red brick asymmetrical picturesque composition and is used as a starting point for the design and material selection.
The primary motif is a striking patterned brick veil or brise soleil screening the building from the Western sun. It is employed for passive climate control. The brick veil is set inside a series of deep frames that further control heat gain from the northwest. Its color and pattern modify vertically to respond to the building’s massing, the town planning controls, and the coloration of the neighboring context. A series of breaks and color changes are used to formally organize the façade, while internally framing views of surrounding landmark buildings.
The brise soleil drastically reduces glare and the interior temperature of the building, while retaining views and a connection with the street. Detailed studies were undertaken to ensure interior comfort was maintained while reducing running costs and reliance on mechanical cooling. The traditional brickwork base is made from carbon-neutral bricks made in Tasmania, using biofuels (and offsetting any remaining emissions). Various brick motifs are borrowed from the Post Office to guide and inform the occupants, leading them to the office entry, continuing into the building, and guiding them to the lifts and stairs.
With Covid-19 design principles in mind, the double skin facade allows for ample user-controlled fresh air and natural ventilation while maintaining privacy. Landscaped outdoor spaces, including a large roof garden and a terrace facing Toorak Road, provide green outdoor breakout spaces. The offices are purposefully raw and clean and have been leased as ‘shells’ to reduce or eliminate building waste.
Commercial Building on Pentelis Avenue / Charis Athanasopoulou + Athina Theodoropoulou
Text description provided by the architects. The two-story commercial building on Pentelis Avenue, in a northern suburb of Athens, is an attempt to create a building with “ecological consciousness”. The small, low-energy building is shielded on all its surfaces against heat and cold.
Α metal structure οn the front view, at a distance from its western windows, offers external shading to prevent the penetration of heat into the building and creates a shaded ventilated space between. This structure works as a solar, acoustic, and optical filter.
The commercial character of the surrounding area provided incentives to create additional open space for the users on the roof of the building. A concrete pergola, integrated with the metal construction of the front view, is placed for the protection of this recreation roof area, forming an interesting building volume.
The projection of this building volume through the urban fabric that surrounds it is achieved by emphasizing the distinctive structural elements of the building and following simple and clean design lines in contrast to the morphologically diverse built environment.
The hue of the materials chosen – uncoated, unpainted concrete in the main volume with metallic details – underlines the geometry of the volume and allows natural light to integrate into the building shell and give it dynamism.
TINA – Flexible Office and Residential Building / STUDIO SOZIA
Basic concept. Due to low land reserves and the associated sharp rise in land prices in the greater Freiburg area, our client acquired a commercial property that was almost 85% cheaper than the desired multi-family property. As a response to this ambivalence, which is not unusual nationally, we developed the idea of designing an office building that could be converted into a variable number of apartments if the land use plan were to be adjusted in the future with just a few interventions on the expansion level.
Urbanism. A free-standing, three-storey solitaire was developed based on the geometry of the property and the future, selective surrounding development of the new commercial area. In order to enable flexible office and apartment sizes in the long term, even beyond the actual floor and thus also a later separation of the currently planned two usage units into three, an external development in the north-east, facing the access road, was integrated. The projecting, semi-circular stair landing breaks up the clear geometry of the volume, marks the entrances to the individual units and serves as a communicator in the surrounding urban space. Barrier-free access is also from the outside via a through-loading elevator on the north facade.
Functional concept. With a 5 x 5 meter load-bearing grid, the building is transformed from the closed wall panel in the north, via a free-standing wall panel in the center, to an open support structure in the south with an adjoining, spacious outdoor area. Despite the high structural requirements of the earthquake zone, this structural transformation made it possible to create a resource-efficient, long-lasting supporting structure, which at the same time enables maximum flexibility in use and zoning.
Spatial concept. Coherent with the functional concept, the service rooms such as toilets, storage and technology are housed on the closed north wall. All work areas are oriented around the heart of the kitchen, as a communicative place of exchange. The outdoor areas in the south are used for relaxation, for informal exchange and as a temporary workplace.
Expression. The conceptual guiding principle of the transformation is also reflected in the facade design. While the north facade appears completely opaque with a rear-ventilated trapezoidal sheet metal facade, the west and east facades open up to the surroundings with large window elements measuring 2.5 x 3.0 meters. The south-facing balconies and the terrace, which extend across the entire width of the building, form the conclusion and the second physical interface to the outside space.
The building zones are visually connected by the continuous horizontal façade bands, which also accommodate the textile sun protection. Inspired by the commercial context, all components of the building are planned in industrial quality and the interior is designed as a refined shell. On the other hand, there is a high proportion of glass in the façade, which is untypical for commercial areas. Curated by the use inside, this should create communication and revitalize the surrounding commercial area.
The building is a functionally sustainable and future-oriented building due to the massive construction required in the earthquake area and the flexible and barrier-free usable floor plan. With special attention to the unbundling potential of the construction, the façade can be easily upgraded to the current status even if requirements change in the future.
The number of property employees employees in the UK working from home has dropped by almost half in the space of a year.
According to latest government figures, 9.3 per cent of the sector’s workforce were yet to return to the office in January.
That compares to 16.9 per cent in January 2022, and signals a continuing change in culture as the effects of the Covid pandemic continue to wane.
The official government report surveyed 10,000 business across the UK on working patterns, including 130 firms in the real estate sector.
And while a further 26.1 per cent of estate agents were using a hybrid model – where workers spend some of the week in the office and some at home – a full 59.5 per cent had returned to the office full time.
The figures were revealed in the Office for National Statistics’ Business Insights and Conditions Survey.
“Nearly three years after Covid struck, we are finally seeing a big move back to the office, especially for real estate firms. The drop in home-working of almost 50 per cent in year shows the changing trend and something closer to what used to be called normal business. That will present challenges and opportunities for real estate firms” says Gavin Brown, director of Speak With Impact.
“Some workers may need supported in regaining confidence to deal face-to-face with others again, and those at the top level will need to brush up on their presentation skills again. But there are also many opportunities.
“While the return to the office is underway, many hybrid influences will remain, especially when it comes to pitching remotely and mixing physical and digital presentations.
“For those who get that right, there will be many opportunities to expand business and contacts, using the few positives from Covid in terms of technology while ramping up activity in person too.”
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