.svg)
<h5-red>Client<h5-red> Royal Enfield I <h5-red>Area<h5-red> 3,91,000 SQ FT I <h5-red>Status<h5-red> Completed 2020 I <h5-red>Team<h5-red> Ambrish Arora, Pankhuri Goel, Raman Vig, Shalini Satish Kumar, Shoaib Kamili I <h5-red>Photographer<h5-red> Edmund Sumner, Vibhor Yadav, REHQ Team
The oldest global motorcycle brand in continuous production, Royal Enfield’s rugged and authentic aesthetic has attained cult status globally. The aspiration for the design of their new headquarters in Chennai was to <rt-red>celebrate the brand’s design philosophy, blending craftsmanship with state-of-the-art engineering.<rt-red> The brief included a need to foster cross-disciplinary collaboration within the company’s various departments, including Marketing, Design, and Engineering. Unpretentious yet highly functional, the design of the campus aims to embody the free-spirited identity of the brand.
A series of sequential blocks is connected through courtyards that punctuate the length of the building, serving as spillover public spaces of varying scales. They create breezeways across the semi-covered verandah spaces and allow internal areas to be naturally lit during the day.
Collectively, the administrative offices, industrial design centre, prototype development centre and the state-of-the-art testing facility including the testing track, enable seamless workflows right from conceptualisation to prototyping, delivery, and marketing of the motorcycle.
Sustainability through first principles is at the heart of the design. Most circulation and breakout areas are naturally ventilated and shaded, cutting the air-conditioned footprint by 30%. In the workspaces, air-conditioning set points are adjusted to higher levels to promote adaptive thermal comfort, complemented by the passive cooling strategies. This is particularly relevant given that the nature of work involves frequent movement between indoor and outdoor environments, making it essential to minimise thermal shock. These measures have contributed to the facility earning an IGBC Platinum rating for environmental performance.
Natural lighting is optimised through windows, clerestories, and skylights. A fully glazed north facade with vertical shading fins provides glare-free illumination, while the east and west facades maintain a 50% window-to-wall ratio. Solar panels shade courtyards, minimising heat gain.
Referencing the local vernacular, Mangalore roofing tiles clamped between pre-stressed steel cables have been used to form a system of operable louvres along the Southern facade, acting both as a shading device and a rain screen. Interspersed with planters, they bringing fresh air and diffused light into the primary circulation corridors on all levels.
Each floor follows an open-plan layout for cross-connection between workstations, with informal, semi-enclosed, acoustically-insulated discussion tables placed around bike stations, as well as glass-enclosed meeting rooms for privacy. Dedicated call booths distributed around the open-plan floorplate allow for undisturbed conversations, while breakout areas foster engagement.
Inspired by Royal Enfield’s ‘naked bike’ aesthetic, where the engineering details of the bike are intentionally exposed, the building’s architecture celebrates its engineering and structural details. Honest in its expression, without any extraneous details to conceal its mechanics, the exposed structural and service intersections and details are meticulously designed and resolved—every nut, bolt, and joint crafted as part of the larger whole.
The 3,00,000 sq ft project had to be developed within a tight span of two years, necessitating a highly collaborative approach between the studio, Royal Enfield’s project engineering team and the execution architects, S N Pingle. Using a hybrid construction process with pre-engineered structures, in-situ casting and handcrafted elements, and ensuring millimetre-level accuracy, the ambitious goals of the campus have been delivered.
<rt-red>IGBC Platinum Rating<rt-red>
December 2023
