A MODERN HISTORY

BACKGROUND

In the early 1990s, the Indian economy saw a major boom in the business sector, as a multitude of brands and multi-national companies percolated into the country. Post liberalization, with the tenets of market fundamentalism, and worship of technology, corporate hubs grew and evolved. This new world became an integral part of the Indian city life, and a new architectural typology was born. The corporate office building, a floor by floor space stacked up on top of the other, confining workers with the new model of workstations inspired from the ideals of Taylorism, became a standard touchstone for large scale corporate spaces. These buildings brought with them not just a new style of architecture, but a certain kind of a work culture, and lifestyle. In a post independent country, they generated an era of hope, for the Indian common man, where college education followed by a steady job equalled a successful future. Beginning in the last decade of twentieth century, this new model of work life weaved itself in the country’s existing urban fabric effortlessly.

But predominantly, this model of the corporate office was borrowed from major western influences, where in India, neither the architecture was suitable, nor was the work culture familiar. Today, after several indigenous companies built theirconglomerates in the country, and after years of evolution in the technologies of corporate industry, around 90% of offices still follow the architecture of the conventional and borrowed office model used previously. Apart from functionality, it serves very little to its user and contributes even lesser to its context.

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