Olympia Commercial Terraces
Olympia Terraces is a multi-tenanted commercial building located in the Guindy Industrial estate, Chennai. Due to the site being a narrow strip of land (15m x 73m) with the longer side facing the road, the resultant building could only be long and narrow. With the longer sides facing East and West, the building would always have the sun beating down either one of the faces in the morning or the evening hours.
Location
Size
Chennai
--
2022
The building has four office floors above the ground floor that has a machine-stacked car parking system on one half and an office with a garden on the other half. On the roof of the building, a cafeteria with a peripheral garden is proposed. To improve the users’ experience, the long rectangular building was broken into two halves on either side of the vertical transportation core. Each of the halves was further split into two, with a landscaped garden and a connecting glass bridge in between. The intention was to bring natural glare-free light into the office space from the sides through the garden while providing landscape relief for the end users. The gardens that span across the office spaces are terraced away from the road causing an interesting play of light and shadow.
Fenestrations on the Eastern and Western walls are treated as openings with rectangular vertical wall panels that detach themselves from the wall surface and seemingly ‘float’ in front of the opening. The glazed openings are shaded by these floating panels that allow angular light from all the four sides. This forms an interesting graphic to the façade of the building while shading the building.
