Gensler India-Setting New Benchmarks

Ar. Diwakar Chintala, Design Director, Gensler India

Setting up a foreign architectural firm in India has its own set of challenges. Yet, Ar. Diwakar Chintala is hell-bent on making Gensler India a successful venture. In a free-wheeling interview with Built Expressions, he shares about the journey and future plans of the firm.

With over 19 years experience in a range of complex building types including super-tall, high-rise, commercial, institutional, residential and low-cost housing in the United States, China, Middle East & India, Mr. Diwakar Chintala is now steering the design effort at Gensler operations in India. Gensler, a global architectural and design firm headquartered in California sees vast headroom for growth in India. In the year 2012, Ar. Diwakar moved from Gensler’s office in San Francisco to take up the role to head the Design Studio in the Bangalore office.Being the Design Director, he is accountable for the designs rendered by his team. Ar. Diwakar has a 20 year career stint in the US after pursuing a master’s degree in Urban Design and Environment Behavior. His career had a good start working with architectural majors including Skidmore Owings & Merrill LLP.

In the meanwhile, he also established Studio Chintala, a firm of his own in Berkeley, California and operated it for two years. Gensler began its operations in India as a joint venture with the Space Matrix architecture firm and it was named as Studio i. The joint venture was an experiment carried out in order to hold a place in the Indian market. After a successful experimentation Gensler bought the stakes from the partner and it was reborn as Genlser India in the year 2012.

With an overall strength of 60 architects and designers, Gensler's Indian wing is continually keep their quality by working on international projects from Indian soil. Ar. Diwakar admires Gensler's work milieu that gives freedom to work without any restraint. All 46 of Gensler's offices collaborate well and a good exchange of resources takes place across the workplaces. "Gensler provides us a great platform to express our creativity, views and opinions. For instance, we built a prototype for low cost houses in Chennai, when we appealed our head office, it was approved instantly," he states.

Need for International Standards

Gensler opened their office in India, with the knowledge that India is a challenging market owing to the country's diversified culture and lack of accountability in professionalism. He opines that while there is a great deal of individual craftsmanship it is behind in terms of international architectural standards. The Indian construction industry is certainly developing in professionalism. To cater to this market, adaptability is the key and making adjustments to processes will help.

Currently, we are taking up only interiors aspect of architectural work. We are involved in certain key projects including a previous project in ECO SPACE in Bangalore and Microsoft in Gurgaon among others," he adds. In the coming years, huge potential for world class projects will be opened up in India too. At present, Gensler is on talent building mode. With a team of 42 in India, Gensler is developing designs for projects across the globe. It is involved in designing and detailing process. By way of which the team will get hands on experience to design international standard projects.

Applications Development

Technology has been drawn on at its best. Gensler India has developed mobile phone application purely for internal usage. It supports viewing high profile architects and details of the firm. Currently, it espouses on sharing work related information such as images, designs and so on.

Views on Indian and Western Architecture

When queried on his views on comparison of Indian and Western architecture, he admits that architecture is incomparable based on the geographies and says, "On the grounds of architecture I don't like to distinguish between the Indian and western architecture. Both styles of architectures have their own uniqueness. In Western regions, houses built are in a uniform fashion as the entire construction process is completely outsourced, hence we see similar thought process. Where as in India, the dweller himself is involved in the process, hence you witness a diversified designs and structures. Even the materials used depend on the geographical conditions."

Minimalistic Approach

Ar. Diwakar elaborates on intrinsic elements of architecture. Minimalism is a concept to which he is closely drawn to. Minimalism is essentially movements in different forms of art and designs, where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features. "According to me, if you have minimalistic approach in architecture, arriving at solutions becomes easier. Any problem in this world has a definite solution, provided one must tackle it in a smart way, which is sometimes is rational and minimalistic approach.

Take the mobile phone for instance, it exhibits various functionalities of operations on the exterior part of it including the curves, positioning of buttons etc. It looks simple, functional and yet minimalistic in approach. I vouch for this concept in architecture. A virtuous approach towards the problem concludes for a better result. I stress upon honesty to be the most important part of an architect and what comes out is beautiful by virtue of your intention,” he adds.

Future Plans

India has massive infrastructural challenges, going forward; Ar. Diwakar has set sights on contributing to a better infrastructure. “Our country faces numerous concerns of traffic congestion, pollution and a lack of good environment for people. Our intention is to bring about a sea change in the infrastructure problems. However, we believe the change should begin right from your neighbourhood and thus we as a team working on the developments that can be made around our office region.

10 years from now, Gensler is intended to hold a place in the architecture of Indian structures. "India faces numerous issues like congestion, pollution; traffic etc. and our action will enable to put an end to such issues over here. Our intention is to bring about a sea change in the infrastructure and contribute towards its growth. We as a team are working on the developments that can be made around our office region. The pavements are not in order, the roads are messed up, and so we are trying to design the road from the metro station up to 80ft road as an experiment. As it is voluntary project, we plan to gather funds from the shop owners over here and hopefully implement such ideas on the other places too" adds Ar. Diwakar.

Currently they are involved in interior architecture projects in India and simultaneously sculpting the Indian minds with International standards of architecture. As a part of their agenda Gensler India are awaiting to start off with better projects on Indian platform and witness good infrastructure in the future years to come. He likes to conclude by saying that “In India our resources are very limited and our culture is so rich, we don’t have to try too hard, that’s the reason I see most of the good buildings in India are the simple ones”.