Location: Nashik, India.

Architect: SANJAY PURI ARCHITECTS.

The CC offices building in Nashik, Maharashtra is a multi-functional space that includes restaurants, exhibition spaces, an auditorium, and offices. The building is designed to be responsive to the climate, energy-efficient, and sustainable. The site is located in a wet and dry climatic zone, with an average highest recorded temperature of 30.7°C in summer and an average lowest recorded temperature of 18.5°C in winter. The building is designed in a fragmented volume in a 4m x 4m grid that gradually steps back from the arterial road side, creating north-facing terraces that augment a large ground-level garden created centrally. The building creates a sculptural internal space that echoes the organic hill settlements of old Indian cities, capturing the traditional urban fabric in a contemporary language. The building is designed to generate a large public space at the ground level with landscaped areas and water bodies to create a passion cooling effect. This area becomes a public gathering space for the city’s inhabitants and simultaneously creates a pedestrian path through the building to the road on the opposite side. The office spaces have a separate clearly defined entry on the western side while the auditorium, library, and restaurant spaces are accessible to the public from the north-facing public park and the eastern side. The building plays a multi-faceted role, providing offices opening into landscaped terraces suffused with natural daylight, while simultaneously creating large public spaces for the city’s inhabitants, engaging them. The design while being contextual and sustainable evolves a new direction of creating public spaces for a city starved of green spaces.