contact_magazine_#36_EN

Offices from across the world
an undulating view from underneath as if plunged
into an Indian Ocean of cognac, discovering the
softly rippling surf above. “Quite an eyeful, don’t
you think?” Sanjay Puri laughs, obviously delighting
in the Baroque cornucopia of the office building he
has designed in Navi Mumbai, a new, modern urban
development in the north of the Indian mega-city.
“But the opulence and heterogeneousness in this
project are purely intentional, because they visualise
where our client’s competency lies.”
© Vinesh Gandhi
In the heart of the
Indian cornucopia.
© Vinesh Gandhi
Narsi & Associates was founded around forty years
ago, began as a small carpentry firm and developed
in the course of time into the largest B2B furniture
manufacturer for the office and commercial markets
in the country. Among Narsi’s clients are Google,
Amazon, Deloitte, Unilever, and the Indian automobile
concern Tata. “Narsi builds, develops and
produces furniture in the XXL range in small series”,
explains Sanjay Puri, “and the assignment involved
planning an office located directly next to the
factory, which simultaneously acts as showroom for
the customers. And it was the client’s express wish
to design it as complex as possible as regards space,
geometry, materials, design and building technology,
because the firm itself produces everything we
planned here. The office is so to speak a show-off
opportunity and the ultimate proof that nothing is
impossible.” Short break. Deep exhalation. A smile
beaming sheer delight. “A client that wants things
expensive and complicated. Sheer paradise for me as
an architect!”
An office has been developed in Navi Mumbai
for the furniture manufacturers Narsi &
Associates. Architect Sanjay Puri pulled out
all the stops and created an opulent, indeed
almost Baroque showroom that not only
visualises his client’s proficiency but gives
it palpable form as well. This is not for the
ascetic or minimalist!
© Vinesh Gandhi
You enter the extraordinary office building with the
ominous project title “Office @63” – named after
plot number 63 in the business park of Navi Mumbai
– via a lobby eleven metres high. Visitors are
meant to be ensnared and wooed already with the
first steps they take inside: you arrive at two waiting
areas via small wooden catwalks that seem to float
It scintillates and flashes and glitters and gleams and
teems like a huge, never-ending picture puzzle. On
the floor: high-gloss Grigio Armani marble from
Italy; on the walls an interplay of concrete, corten
steel, walnut veneer, square exhibition recesses and
CNC-milled light panels; finally, on the ceiling, a
pixel-type collage of acoustic panels, expressionist,
cubist-angular aluminium cassettes and hundreds of
brass tubes suspended in different lengths, revealing
© Vinesh Gandhi
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