Vivanta whitefield[1]

Lobby and main entrance

VIVANTA by Taj Hotels I N T E R N AT I O N A L T E C H PA R K , B A N G A LO R E

Warner Wong Design | WOW Architects 3O Hill Street O1- 04 Singapore 17936Owww.wowarchitects.com t 65 6333 3312 e [email protected]

The brief calls for the creation of a purpose built 5 star business hotel offering an optimal environment for networking opportunities among top IT companies within the International Tech Park, Bangalore. The response is a unique combination of contemporary space design and high-end technology set within landscaped grounds. The scheme comprises of a three story block that weaves itself from the ground and flexes its way mid-air to contain the rooms and spaces within its form. This ‘landscraper’ allows green to flow to the roof of the building, blurring the distinction between where the building starts and where the ground ends. The hotel at once combines the conveniences and practical needs of the business traveller with a hip and cool factor that every young and young at heart business traveller aspires towards.

www.wowarchitects.com

The design of hotel is ‘the venue’ that is vibrant, and exciting. •

The green park-life environment that will not only facilitate its •function as a business hotel, but also encourage social interaction and exchange on a myriad of levels.

The rooms function well for the working professional, but are yet •comfortable, spacious and homely.

The public areas provide welcome relief from the hectic working •environment and dense city life.

Thefoodandbeverageofferingsaretastyandfun,butyet•unintimidating.

The Spa and wellness areas provide a retreat and regeneration zone •for the tired business person.

The landscape becomes an integral part of the hotel experience.•

Operational Objectives

Design Challenges The surrounding context of the site is largely underdeveloped with no prospect of street life or urban repose. The neighboring developments are designed so that they are disconnected from one another creating a social fortress. There is no existing town center or focal point in which the tech park’s occupants can converge to interact and exchange ideas in a more informal setting. Downtown is at least 45 minutes away leaving the precinct somewhat lifeless after working hours. With these factors in mind the successful design response of the hotel has to produce an environment that positions itself as a hub within the tech park , as well as an activity hub for the Whitefield area.

Low building height restrictions result in the need for high site coverage which reduces open areas for gardens, swimming pools and spaces for outdoor activity. The strategy was then to float the hotel block above the ground level, thus creating available space underneath for all hotel amenities.

From the moment the guests arrive at the port-cochere, the experience of the landscraper begins. The lobby itself is a garden room. It is also the ‘nexus’ and confluence of several space streams. Space ‘flows’ from the lobby in several directions. It flows through to the courtyard beyond and steps up to the upper terrace of the Indian restaurant, before flowing upwards to the roof terrace of the banquet hall and the open air Moroccan style Bar and Grill. The lobby also flows through to the banquet pre-function hall and the all day dining. It flows through a portal to the pool deck. It also flows through the lift lobby to the Spa and Gym.


Lobby and main entrance

Proposed Design Concept

Our brief was to develop a new generation business hotel, one that combines the needs of the business

traveller and the little luxuries that makes a home away from home a vibrant and exciting place to be.

The Vivanta by Taj in the internationally famous ITPL Tech Park Bangalore is the first product by Taj and

WOW Architects | Warner Wong Design, and locally executed by Spazzio Design Architecture, India that

addresses this emerging market segment. It is a hotel that breaks the mould of the traditional hotel in

several exciting ways.

This scheme proposes a three story block that extrudes itself from the ground and flexes its way mid-

air to contain 200 rooms within its form. This podium construct acts like a ‘landscraper’ (the opposite to

skyscraper), a highly sculpted ground hugging structure that allows green to flow up to the roof of the

building blurring the distinction between where the building starts and where the ground ends. Hence, by

the two simple maneuvers of slicing and folding of the ground plane, the limited open space prescribed by

the high site coverage is expanded in perception and the podium dematerialized.


Swimming pool/gym/hotel block


Landscraper The “landscraper” structural typography then becomes containers of the various hotel ‘public’ activities and functions, providing the users with a seamless journey between one space to the next. The landscraper structure behaves like Malleable linear volumetric strips which are able to embody the characteristics of the ground by replacing the greenery it has displaced. In order to emphatically express the landform design approach, cast insitu concrete was selected as the major construction material and left exposed where ever possible. Figurative incisions in the concrete served to express the dynamic flowing nature of the design and helped smooth out the construction joints of the panels.

Design Advancement:By using nature, topography and context as a design primer instead of adopting building precedents, the hotel sets out to achieve an altogether new direction to how a business hotel can be approached and experienced.

Social Advancement:Visual interaction and openness is encouraged by achieving transparency through strategic use of voids at different levels of the building. Public spaces flow all the way to the roof garden level where functions and events can take place.

Technical advancement:Use of a light-weight roof garden construction in conjunction with ‘green walls’ (vertical planting) are designed to create the ‘landscraper’ experience.

Woven forms


Lobby and main entrance IconThe manipulation of the ground plane to encapsulate the hotel public spaces is derived from the idea of the contextual site ‘soil’ becoming the program, becoming the architecture and eventually becoming the experience of the user. This concept is in response to the client’s aspirations for a business hotel that reflects the company’s innovative entrepreneurial spirit whilst creating a social hub for the tech park round the clock.

Because we wanted to work with the skill level of the local construction industry, and because we felt a ‘RAW’ look would be appropriate for the concept, we accepted imperfection as a virtue. Thus, defects in the workmanship was embraced as a positive part of the aesthetic, and a strong bush hammer finish was used to ‘even out’ the texture of the exposed concrete.

In areas where concrete was not appropriate, simple rough plaster, stone or wood panelling is used. At all times, we keep the material palette for exterior and interior sympathetic to each other, so as to blur the distinction between architecture and landscape.

Floor, walls and ceilings blended and folded into each other. This material response heightens the awareness of the basic landscraper concept.


Lounging

Entertainment is a vital factor in the successful positioning of the new hotel. Thus, we envisaged the roof top

bar and grill playing a key role in attracting local clientele as well as entertaining in house guests.

It is based on an Indian garden pavilion theme, and taking avantage of Bangalore’s good climate, natural

ventilation is used, and great unobstructed views of the surrounding tech park and the hotel’s sloping garden

roof can be enjoyed by the guests.

The access is through a series of dramatic vertical accents. Either from the lobby along the main grand stair

promenade, up from the pool along the main sloping roof garden, or an intimate passage from the patio of the

Indian Restaurant.

The journey is then rewarded by arriving into a cosy lounge that is a series of tented seating platforms around a

reflecting pool. An indoor disco/live music area for higher volume partying and merry making.

Lounge and Bar


Specialty Cuisine

The Indian Restaurant is based on the cuisine of the India’s North West. There is a strong emphasis on bread,

meats and Grilled Vegetables. In order to take advantage of the mild weather of Bangalore, the design layout

is a dining room with an open plan kitchen and a large dining patio. The entire kitchen is a backdrop to the

restaurant where the bread oven, tandoor and grill become show case elements for the guests. Material patterns

of the floor ‘wraps’ up the floor and ceiling of the restaurant that provide a seamless transition between an

‘indoor-outdoor’ space.

Specialty Restaurant Perspective


All Day Dining Dynamism

This restaurant is the main dining area and is located close to the lobby and the ‘nexus’ of activity and flows

of the hotel. It is a tall dynamic space that looks and is connected to several courtyards, gardens, terraces

and the main pool deck.

The ceiling of the dining room is a dynamic ‘energy field’; a rippling and waving surface that interacts with

the action stations and dinners below. The buffet is a series of Pan Asian food action stations that offer tasty

samplings ‘wrapped’ in an architectural opera. The floor, walls and ceilings seem to flow into each other.

There is a large screen TV that hovers above and promises interesting media offerings on a regular basis.

A wide stairway promenade containing the ‘front of house’ facilities wraps around the podium in an

interlocking manner to engage the green rooftop, stemming from the dining area.

Lobby entrance and ramp view


Lobby and main entrance Spatial Flex

The grass promenade behaves like a boulevard housing street-side cafes, boutiques, bars, restaurants, and

gyms offering all the excitement and festivity of an urban boulevard. The proposal is a flexible and efficient

commercial space having the ability for the programmed facilities to overlap each other, and the ability to

expand or interchange according to demand and situation.

From a distance, the hotel mass looks like a medley of green and blue patterns. This is because the room

facade is conceived from a digital picture of the site taken prior to construction. The image was pixelated

and recomposed in the memory of the site.

When seen from the park, the building mass looks like a smooth transition of greens to blues, blending with

the trees and sky. The overall effect is soothing from outside and inside as well, where from the experience

of the individual rooms, no single view is ever the same. The flowing shape ensures that each room has a

distinctive view of the green roof-scape and pool views, and the pattern of the facade ensures that every

room has a different mood lighting that filters in as well.

Under construction photo of sloping grass promedage


East Elevation Concept Memory Creation

The distinct elevation of the hotel block is created by digitizing a landscape image of the site and applying

different shades of glass that matches the pixels of that image as a memory of the site.


Viewpoint

The words of theorist Guy Debord’s analysis in his book ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ relating to

environmental planning and urbanism became pertinent

in the design process:

‘The same history that threatens this twilight world is capable of subjecting space to a directly experienced

time…that critique of human geography whereby individuals and communities must construct places and

events commensurate with the appropriation, no longer just of their labor, but of their total history. By

virtue of the resulting mobile space of play, and by virtue of freely chosen variations in the rules of the game,

the independence of places will be rediscovered without any new exclusive tie to the soil, and thus too the

authentic journey will be restored to us, along with authentic life understood as a journey containing its

whole meaning within itself.’


Lobby and main entrance AccomodateEmphasis in spatial crafting particularly reflects the thoughts projected by Debord’s critique in the landscraper’s ability to firstly displace and then recreate the characteristics of the original site.

Hotel Room Perspectives

Hotel Room Perspectives


Stay

The interiors have been designed with the knowledge of specific function and purpose it needs to deliver in order for the user to have an ‘authentic’ experience.

The room concept is that of an urban studio loft. It was conceived of as one open plan space, within which 28m2 is zoned into bedroom study croner, relaxation corner, naturally lighted shower, walk-in-wardrobe and bathroom and glass enlcosed wc. The appliances and conveniences of TV, minibar, magazine rack, AV systems are all built into the walls.

The rooms carry a light and lifted ambience by way of fit and finish, stemming from the loft concept. Clever space conservation and an openess that is created by natural light reinforces this concept.

WOW Architects 3O Hill Street O1- 04 Singapore 17936Owww.wowarchitects.com t 65 6333 3312 e [email protected]

Architect’s Statement

We began the entire design process by understanding the cultural, economic and geo-climatic context of the Bangalore area.

Because of the low mass dictated by the urban design guidelines, and because of the mild climate of Bangalore, we decided upon a strong landscape strategy as the concept driver. Taj readily supported our desire to design the architecture, interiors and landscape as one integrated experience.

In order to tap into the mindset and profile of the expected client base, the hotel was to deliberately zestful in spirit and dynamic in design. To express the borderless potential of the new generation, the building itself was formed by a simple conceptual ‘twist and fold’ of the ground plane to create a conceptual endless ‘promenade’ of spatial experiences.

The form design is conceived from the figure of 8 ‘mobius strip’, a 3 dimensional twisted loop that has a 2 dimensional continuous flowing surface. The hotel is thus conceived of as a ‘land-scraper’, the ideal form and space that unifies and blends the building with the earth, and becomes essentially an experientially rich hospitality space. Public and Private spaces flow and connect to each other and there is a cinematic treatment of the spaces and places in the hotel.

We envisage that this strong sense of ‘flow’ will result in increased guest movements, and as a result, more interaction, and this will be a benefit for the expected young and trendy clientele for the hotel.

Wong Chiu ManDirector, Warner Wong Design