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Peekay Steel 3D printing center, (India)
Reference details
- Location Bangalore, India
- Technique(s) VMZINC Standing seam
- Aspect(s) PIGMENTO Red
- Application Type Facade, Roofing
- Contractor(s) Sunil M Baliga (Anvi Envelop Design & Engineering LLP)
- Copyright Shamanth Patil J
Industrial memory
New technologies have ensured that Bangalore enjoys a worldwide reputation as India’s tech capital. It aims to reconcile innovation and development, drawing on the Californian model. To achieve this aim, it is developing a 230-hectare area near its airport, known as Airport City, combining a business park, shops, a concert hall and leisure facilities. Peekay Steel Casting, a company founded in the 1950s the steel industry, which remains its core business, has taken the logical step to locate its 3D additive manufacturing experimentation centre there.
Both a public showcase for the company’s innovation and a research and equipment centre, the building welcomes visitors and employees alike. Due to the important role of the centre within the company and its location close to the main access to the airport, the directors of Peekay Steel Casting wanted to ensure it would be a landmark building, with a ‘identifying’ architecture that clearly asserts the nature of the industry.
The architects from Venkataramanan Associates have designed a hybrid building, reflecting the duality between reception and production that structures the building in its opposition between transparent and opaque parts.
In the centre of the building, the machines and production areas have been laid out in such a way as to make them visible through glass partitions or from mezzanines floors. The shed, a symbol of industry in the collective imagination, manifests itself in the form of light grids or solid, vertical walls. On these opaque parts, the use of standing seam zinc cladding enhances the materiality of the facade and evokes the manufactured product. The red colour of PIGMENTO ® reinforces the building’s unique appearance, and is reminiscent of the sandstone from which some of the country’s greatest monuments are hewn.
An industrial building with a future-oriented facade that boasts dual certification: IGBC gold (Indian standard) and LEED (international mark of excellence for sustainable buildings).
