Episode 11: Reza Kabul | Making a Difference, a Havells Podcast

Okay.

Your philosophy has always been that design must liberate space.

How does that philosophy vary from 800 square foot apartment to a multi-story building?

So when I mean by liberating spaces, I say that the indoors and outdoors should be well connected.

There should be enough light coming into the place.

There should be enough size of the windows and everything should be nice.

And there should be not much barrier between the inside and the outside.

So when you're living in your space, but then you feel you're living in with nature, you're living in with the outside world as well.

So that's what I mean by liberating spaces.

All right.

Now let's go back to 2002 when you build the Sripati Arcade in Mumbai, which was 154 meters high and had 45 floors.

What kind of thinking and thought process led to the origin of Shripati Arcade that you guys thought we must make it the highest building in Mumbai.

So there were quite a few points when we conceptualize the building.

Mr. Rajendra Chittuvedi, the client himself was very much involved in the project with us and he trusted us and he gave us a project.

So we started the project and he wanted, so he had never built anything tall and we had never built anything tall.

So doing that building was a big challenge firstly because of the land space.

And the access to the land itself also was small because there were buildings around it.

If we would start, you know, the buildings next door would collapse.

Yeah.

So we started building.

We put the footprint and we built it with the top down construction.

So we had basements, but we didn't do the basement.

We did top down construction.

So we did piling, which went down below the ground and we started building the tower on top.

And then There were a lot of things that we had to learn because nobody had done that at all.