Thaindian News

Washington, March 13 (IANS) An Indian-American mother daughter-led firm that has designed several award-winning projects around the world has now set its eye on India with three new contemporary commercial and residential complexes in Gurgaon.

“We’re a firm that has always had a very strong sense of place, of roots, and of keeping those in view even as we look to the future in our design practice,” says New Delhi born Suman Sorg, founding principal of Washington-based Sorg Architects.

“These three new commissions in India give us a chance to demonstrate both of those instincts,” Sorg, who runs one of the largest woman-owned architecture practices in the US, with her 30-year-old daughter, Nikki, told IANS.

Sorg has also won a “City of the Future” competition imagining Washington in the year 2108. Sorg’s award-winning scheme imagined a “City of Ideas” that envisions it as an incubator and platform for international exchange and education and yet preserves and enhances its historical identity.

Among the over 250 projects in the US and abroad designed by her firm are US embassies in Afghanistan, Barbados, Finland and Saudi Arabia, Holocaust Memorial Museum, Kovno Ghetto Exhibit, Egg-Shaped Digesters Facility, National Library of the Czech Republic and Library of Congress, Coolidge Auditorium.

Each of her planned projects for India is unique, and uniquely suited to India’s natural and cultural climate and will bring high quality contemporary architecture to Gurgaon, the burgeoning New Delhi satellite town, says Sorg.

“We’re excited about these new projects,” she says about the three projects called the Grand Arch, Skyon and Sector 62, set to open over the next year and a half.

“We’ve been working in India for a number of years, but this represents a unique opportunity: these three large-scale, multi-use structures really reflect the best of our practice’s work,” Sorg said,

They come at a time when India is becoming such an important player in the economic and cultural life of the world, she says. “We’re looking to contribute to that.”

The three projects (along with a projected fourth, still in the conceptual phase) are part of a larger regional plan from developer Ireo Management, India’s first and largest private equity firm devoted to the domestic real estate sector, with a fund of $2 billion.

First among the three projects is the standard bearer for Ireo’s Gurgaon initiative, The Grand Arch. Located on a 30-acre site, this new multi-family residence features over 900 units in high and mid-rise buildings, as well as central community, cultural, and recreational facilities.

For the design of the 12-building complex, Sorg took a cue from classic works of India’s past like the Taj Mahal.

The result is a minimalist monument with a refined sensibility, an approach that will give India’s growing middle class a new perspective on contemporary living amidst the current national building boom, she says.

Skyon is the second of the trio-a twenty-two acre landscaped residential development comprising two 44-storey multi-unit towers, row housing, single-family homes, a clubhouse, entertainment and leisure spaces, a healthcare centre, and multiple retail storefronts.

Sector 62 is a commercial office tower with a coolly modern look focused around a lush, tropical retail piazza, open to the sky. Atop a two-storey base housing high-end retail, a fourteen-story tower with 250,000 square feet of office suites rises behind an irregularly gridded, curtain-wall façade.

(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)