Working with space and elements to make it functional is both challenging and interesting. Architects are the experts who achieve these and make the space liveable or usable. Lot of detail goes into architectural work and it is no child’s play.
Some architectural firms stand apart from others with their sheer designs and eye for detail. Studio Symbiosis is one such architectural and design firm. It is an award winning multi-disciplinary architecture and design studio based out of Stuttgart and New Delhi. The studio’s name itself defines the ethos of the practice. They aim to create built environment that exists in symbiosis with its surroundings.
Sustainability is at the core of the design studio and is reflected in projects ranging from masterplans, bio-diversity parks, hospitality architecture, museums to even the scale of product design. It is critical for us to create meaningful architecture where the built form is measured against various performance driven criteria to create a robust and efficient design. We call it performative aesthetics, emphasise the founders.
Studio Symbiosis was founded by Amit Gupta and Britta Knobel. The founding partners are postgraduates from the prestigious AA School of Architecture London, and then went on to work on several prestigious projects at the Pritzker winner architecture studio of Zaha Hadid at her London office. During this duration, of approximately five years, each of the founding partners were working on various scales and typologies. These two institutions of design imbibed a sense of a research-based approach in Amit and Britta. The design process starts without a pre-notion of the final form but rather a process, a journey that one takes during the design process.
At Studio Symbiosis they successfully delivered prestigious hospitality as well as masterplan projects. In the last few years, the studio expanded into in-house teams of landscape, sustainability, interiors and product design. Also, there is a separate smart geometry group in the office, which looks into research and development in the field of digital architecture.
Overcoming Teething Problems
Studio Symbiosis started off by bagging three prestigious projects, namely Rai Bareilly Sports city, 200 rooms Hilton, Ahmedabad and Stuttgart Villa. Given the fact that the founding partners had practiced for most of their professional career in Europe, it was critical to understand the execution technology in India.
“These are two worlds apart. In Zaha’s office we would just send a 3D BIM model to contractor to get the co-ordinates in place but in India the role of technology on construction site was very limited over a decade ago. The practise made sure to go slowly and steadily, in terms of not trying too many projects in the beginning and to be very critical in terms of aligning the design and drawings in terms of the construction technology,” shared the founders.
Given the fact that architecture is a teamwork, they got on board consultants with over thirty to forty years of experience as part of the design team. This was a check they placed on themselves, with the experience of the team creating a synergy in the execution of the project.
Prestigious Projects
The Studio is currently involved in projects of various scales and sectors ranging from hospitality, housing, master plans, offices, commercial building, shopping malls, villas, museums, interiors and products.
Currently the Studio has 40 live architectural projects in the office in India and five in the Germany office. In hospitality, the key projects are Hilton Kathmandu, Double Tree by Hilton Ahmedabad, Taj Ahmedabad, Port Blair resort and spa, Hyderabad hotel and service apartment.
In the cultural sector, they are working on 890 acres Eco Park for NTPC which is already under construction and will be the second biggest manmade Eco Park in the world and the biggest in the country. Other projects in this sector are Perfume Park and Museum in Kannauj spread over 100 acres, Gwalior Central railway station and masterplan, Bengaluru (BYPL) railway station.
“In the last few years, we have rapidly moved into Hyderabad and Mumbai with housing, commercial and hospitality projects. Also, in residential projects we are already working on a Ludhiana housing project spread over 10 acres which is under construction, alongside similar sized project in Jhansi. Internationally we have on-going projects in Germany, Arizona, Belgium, Indonesia, Burkina Faso and Togo,” shared the founders.
Mitigating Pollution through Designs
The founders are very environment conscious and are doing their bit to prevent pollution. They are concerned about the increasing air pollution in Indian cities and across the globe. They are you taking steps through their designs to mitigate pollution as much as they can.
Studio Symbiosis has developed an Air Purification system called “Aũra”, which has been developed using principles of aerodynamics.
Aũra is a 5.5-meter-high cleaning tower and helps in tackling the air pollution problem at city as well as neighborhood level. This has been designed as a hotspot product to ensure clean air for inhabitants, to tackle the issue at the source.
Simulation studies were conducted to attain minimum resistance and maximum surface area to achieve this optimum design. An elliptical geometry has been designed at the starting point, as this gave us the minimum resistance, and also for the same reason this geometry is used for the wings of an aircraft. The form was further developed by twisting the form, this twist in geometry channels the wind along the surface of the tower in the z direction, thereby exponentially increasing the surface area.
Reconnecting Humans with Nature
Green spaces have become an integral part of residential and commercial complexes. How do you incorporate these in your designs and architecture? Or what innovations are you making to incorporate green spaces in your architecture?
“Living within nature” is a key theme in the projects of Studio Symbiosis. “With mass urbanization, we can see a growing disconnect between humans and nature. For the physical and mental wellbeing of the user, it is important that they feel very close to nature and be one with their surroundings,” said the founders.
They added, “We look at blurring the boundary between built and landscape. At the design stage both the built and landscape are designed in totality, with the landscape not being an afterthought in the project. Various factors are computed and used to inform the landscape design, these range from local flora, factors of program, site topography, wind and sun direction.”
Sustainable design strategies are also a part of landscape design process. Understanding of the climatic condition of a certain project results in creating an outdoor landscape area that is comfortable for the user. “We integrate human comfort engineering in our designs to ensure meaningful spaces,” they said.
Customised Designs
Each project is unique in terms of site, program, budget, surroundings, site typography, construction technology, availability of materials and so on. It is very important to respect these unique conditions and design a built environment most suitable for that particular project.
For each project Studio Symbiosis looks for a very strong concept which drives the project from concept design till completion.
Each year they also have an overarching design theme in the studio to ensure that they push themselves to innovate. These things range from “low-tech high-tech”, “Green façade”, “reflection in architecture”, “machining architecture” to name a few.
Technology and Creativity
Studio Symbiosis works with the latest technology for its designs for better results.
“On the design side we are working on projects that incorporate artificial intelligence and agent-based modelling. To give you an example for 120 m high sea facing housing project in Versova, we setup an AI script that runs a number of iterations and finds the optimum orientation of the three tower blocks, to maximize the view of the sea from each apartment,” said the founders.
In another project in Andalusia, AI was used to create villas on a 10-acre site, whereby the topography of site and views of the beach were computed to find the optimum views from the spaces.
They are now working on a project in Europe, set in the digital domain whereby the movement of people is tracked in the given space. This movement is tracked in real time and translates into design iterations, which is based on a system driven by location of points in space.
Overcoming Challenges
The biggest challenge in architecture is always to ensure that the built product is better than the design visualizations. Something might look great on paper, but when executed might not have the same quality.
“When starting a project, we look at material availability, budget and which machining tools can be used in the particular project due to the location constraints,” informed the founders.
Prototyping and mock-ups are also very important to see the finishing, material colour, joint detail, fixing detail, etc for any project. These mock-ups give us a sense of the final product how it will look after execution.
Inspired by Nature
For the founders of Studio Symbiosis, Nature is the best role model. Everything is designed with a reason behind it. Patterns and systems in nature exist with an inherent meaning. Each and every element is stripped out of anything unnecessary, creating highly efficient and robust formations. For us it is very interesting to study these elements/phenomena of nature, analyse the system behind them and translate it as a design system. Mostly bio mimicry imitates nature’s models or take them as inspiration, but for us by breaking down these systems in nature using mathematics and creating codes, it gives us the essence of the system.
They believe in a research-based design approach where systems, materials, execution techniques are tested and perfected in the studio before they are rolled out for projects. Hence, in architecture our role models are individuals who dedicated their professional career towards creating a basis for design as research.
Architects such as Frei Otto, Felix Candela, Antonio Gaudi, Oscar Niemeyer, Zaha Hadid are the notable architects that they hold in high prestige. Frei Otto’s studies in Pneumatics, Radiolarian, minimal surfaces and transforming them into light weight structures and the notable Munich Olympic Stadium. Gaudi’s famous inverse chain model that resulted in the design of Sagrada Familia was purely driven by gravity being used to create a structural model and thereby the design. Zaha redefined architecture with her forward-thinking design sketches and later with the use of computational tools. These architects were thinking way ahead of their time and created architectural masterpieces.
The core principle of Studio Symbiosis is “Performance driven architecture” and that is what they want to keep on pushing in the years to come. “It is architecture with a purpose and meaning in everything we do to create a sustainable and smart future for generations to come,” they sign off.
