Time for a quick quiz. What structure has over 7 million square feet of office space,
houses nearly 70,000 workers and ranks as the largest office building in the world.
If you guessed The Pentagon, then… you’re wrong.
In December the title of world’s largest office was taken from the
Potomac polygon and handed to this gigantic new development in the Indian city of Surat.
Thousands of offices, 10,000 square metres of restaurants and cafes,
parking for 5,000 cars and 10,000 motorbikes, 131 elevators, nine courtyard gardens, retail
outlets and conference halls are all built across this 35 acre, high security compound.
A structure this size is a true milestone for India’s construction industry and with a long
list of specialist requirements and a pandemic to contend with, building it was no mean feat.
In an age of hybrid work where office buildings are sitting empty around the world,
this enormous edifice had guaranteed full occupancy before a single rebar was placed.
So who could possibly need a building this big?
This is the story of how and why India built the world’s largest office.
But diamonds are a girl’s best friend.
If you’ve ever bought a diamond,
or are lucky enough to have been given one, chances are it came through here.
This is Surat in the western Indian state of Gujarat,
where a whopping 90 percent of the world’s diamonds are cut and polished.
But as big as this industry is for the city, it has a problem: rough stones arrive in Surat where
they are processed in one of the thousands of small workshops spread around the city.
Most of the finished products are then collected by merchants who travel to
Mumbai over 200 kilometres away where the diamonds are traded and sent around the world.
It’s not exactly efficient and it would be much better for everyone if the whole
business could take place in one city. Or, for that matter, in one building.
That’s why a group of nearly five thousand of the city’s diamond businesses got together to
form the SDB: Surat Diamond Bourse, and this is what they commissioned.
This enormous, USD $388m building was designed to house all of India’s diamond
industry under one roof, that’s cutters and polishers from Surat
and merchants and traders from Mumbai – 4,700 offices containing 67,000 people.
But where do you even start when designing a building that big?
Do you go for a skyscraper? Well the problem with this is with such a huge
volume of people entering and leaving through a relatively small space,
it’s a really inefficient way to manage the flow of people.
Plus, because the SDB is organised along the lines of a guild, all the businesses it represents have
equal status, so anything that resembles a hierarchy is kind of out of the picture.
So, how about a huge office block instead? Well, then you run into the problem of light.
Each office needs access to daylight, which is the best quality for viewing diamonds in.
So anything with a deep floor plan is no good.
Ok then, how about a big doughnut?
Well, there you have the problem of too much of a good thing. Any
office facing east or west would get blasted by direct sunlight,
forcing anyone inside to pull down the blinds and flick the light switch.
So let’s recap, it needs to be big enough to cope with the flow of tens of thousands of people,
and have perfectly consistent light conditions across all offices… oh
and be able to cope with Surat’s stifling, humid heat and monsoon rain.
That’s the challenge that was presented to architects Morphogenesis. They began
by tackling the vast numbers of people the building had to serve.
we'd never done anything close to this before. and we were looking
at this and wondering how are we going to get people in and out of a building
that's 7 million square feet? they’re all all going to come in within a span of an
hour in the morning and they all want to leave in a span of an hour in the evening
To tackle this plan, Morphogenesis set a target that any employee could
reach their office within seven minutes of entering the gate.
So we started thinking about it inside out and we did a lot of traffic simulation
of what that structure would be. And it sort of turned out to be this sort of a fish borne
vertebrate kind of plan, which of course is a very efficient way of distributing nerve
signals from the brain to the rest of the body and the production method of of in in nature
Nine, fifteen-storey towers flank a 400 metre central spine. As well as speeding up access,
by aligning the building north to south it also solved the tricky problem of lighting.
The heights of each of those towers and the distances between them are calculated so
that the office at the bottom, also gets hundred percent daylight, and it doesn't get overshadowed.
The building’s spine also helps it cope with the extreme climate.
Each end flares out to the west to catch the prevailing winds which are funnelled
throughout the complex which provides 50 percent of the building’s cooling needs.
The communal spaces in the spine and courtyards are also essential
for creating the environment diamond traders are used to.
The traders, they don't they don't actually sit around in conference
rooms. They carry these diamonds in little packets in their pocket.
And they sit under a tree and have a cup of tea and. And the trade is done
So that’s the design, but how do you actually build something this big?
After ground broke in December 2017 it took 6,000
people four and a half years to construct this gigantic building.
But the biggest challenge was faced during covid. As global supply chains dried up,
the vast quantities of materials needed
to continue construction had to be sourced a lot closer to home.
we said localise all the materials, only materials that are within a 500 kilometre
radius that we're going to get access to. the ceilings…ceramic tiles... they were
manufactured nearby, We designed and built an
onsite fabrication plant for making the the unitized glazing. And so just raw glass was
coming in from a factory nearby, and this onsite plant was manufacturing full unitized units
As big as the SDB is, this is only the first phase of a bigger plan: DREAM City,
a seven square kilometre smart city providing even more housing and offices for the diamond industry.
But this future may not be so glistening. The global economic
downturn, along with the Ukraine war has hit the jewel market hard.
Earlier this year, 20,000 people in the industry lost their jobs due to a fall in trade.
But regardless of what happens with the wider economy, this building has already
taken on a life of its own and become an iconic structure for a proud public.
It's brought architecture, ... conversation into everyday life,
which really wasn't the case in India. We see that it's begun to drive tourism.
People want to visit it, want to go and study it
now you can call a tourist operator and they've got Surat Diamond Bourse is one of
the things that you should go and visit. I think after two years of pandemic,
everyone's sort of I think it's just sort of giving people a symbol
not just a vision. So I think in some senses it's been … really good that way.
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