Some projects in a firm’s portfolio simply speak volumes about the designers’ evolution at their craft, marking a certain zenith attained. The office building designed by AVN Architecture for Vedant Infra at Ahmedabad is one such project that embodies a creative acme that the designers have accomplished, unpretentiously raw and simultaneously delicately nuanced as it is. What’s more, the time and project management milestones achieved, climatic and site-peculiar problems successfully manipulated and disbursed, make the venture a special feather in their cap.

The very first look at the Vedant Infra office building designed by AVN Architecture gets you subconciously placing it in Ahmedabad; the modernist qualities of structural honesty and pure geometry rendered in exposed concrete and brickwork just cannot be missed. Although the designers have approached the project from the perspective of logical solutions to fulfilling the requirements after overcoming site constraints and choosing a minimalist material palette to deliver a neat and elegant space, the building’s silent evocative bow in the direction of modernist masters whose works have graced Ahmedabad for decades is hard to dismiss.

A ground + two floors structure located on a tight residential plot, Vedant Infra is all glass on the front façade, all brick on the west façade abutting the other road, and all concrete on the remaining two facades. While this makes for a bold and imposing visual, it is actually a fallout of logical problem solving. The present building replaces an old one which stood on a plot formerly allotted for three row houses, due to which the northern and eastern edges of the site got walled in by the abutting neighbours, leaving only the southern and western faces free for access, light and ventilation.

Having decided to leave the housing society’s internal road on the western face free from disturbance, the southern side became the chosen front façade. The complete transparency of this face allows enough daylight to enter to make up for the lack of significant openings on other sides, while double glazing technology (DGU panes) takes care of climatic control.

The  plan, a sort of juxtaposition of two mutually skewed rectangles, makes efficient use of the buildable space while enabling a ‘wall-free’ interior as required by the client. It leaves space for a neatly paved entrance forecourt adorned with a charming temple tucked into the side. As one steps in through the main door, the sublimal quality of the interior space envelops one in a warm, welcoming embrace.

The continuing minimalistic material palette makes the discrimination between outdoors and indoors exteremly subtle. Yet, its extension to all the furnishings like the clean-lined mute coloured large and comfortable sofas and palm-leaf coffee table in the reception lounge, the crisp details of the reception desk with a strip of blue merely suggesting a corporate aura and the MD’s frame-less glass cabin appearing beyond spells class and elegance.

But, the element that catches both, the eye and the heart, is the light flooded atrium to the extreme left adorned with a porous metal staircase, its treads finished in engineered wood. The stair abuts the west facing exposed brick wall having long, narrow slit windows placed at rhythmic intervals, leading to its naming as the ‘bar code wall’! The introduction of a flaming yellow colour on the backing wall that also houses the elevator door, thereby enhancing the natural illumination of the space, and the neat landing the stairs make on a raised carpeted podium are details that must not be missed. This stair atrium connects the three floors and becomes the well articulated heart of the office.

Disposing of the problem of the blind north-eastern corner by clubbing the services into it left a large well-lit unencumbered space for the actual working area. The two upper floors have glass partitioned cabins and meeting rooms lining the southern face and neat cleanlined work stations filling up the rest of the space. While all the ceilings and columns are left bare with the concrete exposed, only the walls enclosing service areas get clad in slatted wood.

The major central portion of the ground floor has the island of the MD’s cabin completely enveloped by transparent frame-less glass panels. Its handsome furnishings include a robust desk and chairs, a large comfortable sofa and other sides which continue in the same minimalist clean-lined style. Again, the sensitive choice of a subtle sea-blue shade on the backing wall doesn’t just enhance the décor’s understated elegance, but  adds just the right dash of vibrancy in the collage of real and reflected images that meets one’s eye on entering the office. Indeed, many more fine details like lighting and joinery details lie in here waiting to be pointed out, appreciated.

The Vedant Infra office, further than being an ideal work space, remains unstintingly loyal to a finely nuanced design ideal. On a day when contemporay and futuristic visuals flooded with a heady mix of technocracy, opulence and pop rule the trends, AVN Architecture has chosen to espouse an austere modernist ideal to excel at, and has brilliantly articulated it to deliver a place of work which is infused with positive energy and immersed in Zen.