About Anand Sharma, co-founder and partner at Design Forum International (DFI):
With over 25 years of experience in the field of architecture, engineering and construction, Anand Sharma has worked across multiple, diverse, and varied scales of projects. He has led the team for well-known commercial projects such as the Select City Walk Mall in Delhi and Guwahati City Centre, the largest retail mall in Guwahati, as well as civic infrastructure developments including Dakshineswar Skywalk in Kolkata, ITO Foot over Bridge in New Delhi and the upcoming Multi-Modal Logistics and Transport Hub in Dadri. More recently, he along with his team has been working on the New Integrated Terminal Building at the Guwahati International Airport and the Bihta Airport in Bihar which is modelled on the ideas of environment-conscious and human-centric design. DFI as a firm employs a versatile approach, consciously staying clear of restrictions of project typologies, with work spanning domains and scales, all across the country.
In his opinion, an architect’s role as a facilitator of change is to create contextually and socially relevant designs. For anything that he endeavour to do, the inherent design philosophy is responsive to the end user’s aspirations and expectations from the built volumes, that they intend to inhibit eventually.
Could you share with us what you identify as the short-term fads and long-term trends brought in by the impact of covid in this sector?
The short term fads have been minimizing and eliminating the touch points without a long-term plan in mind. For instance, the tactic to use toothpicks to press buttons, and the practice to keep doors open – these are just temporary measures that will not be sustained for a long time.
The long-term strategies would be integrating automation into buildings to the maximum extent possible in order to create an all access control, replacing thumb-based biometrics with iris-based biometrics, segregating zones for different kinds of entries, decentralising entry and exit points, and carefully planning and designing for the human traffic and circulation to minimise contact instead of bringing it all together. Earlier, the concerns of security promoted a centralised approach to the design of a workplace. But, the concerns of covid-related safety protocols have somewhat changed that centralisation approach to a staggered approach.
Another long term measure we can observe is the high emphasis on fresh, good-quality air. In fact, in most of the workplaces that we are working on now, there is a focus on improving indoor air quality by adding HEPA filters to the indoor ventilation systems and increasing the percentage of fresh air intake in centrally air-conditioned buildings.
Sustainability was a key factor for every company prior to the pandemic; has it now taken a back seat?
If at all there is an impact on sustainability in the pandemic and post-pandemic era, it is a positive impact. Amongst the many aspects that it encompasses, sustainability’s key focus area has always been concerned with the well-being of people and promoting the cohesive coexistence of occupants of a space with each other and with nature. As a result of this, we are noticing an increased emphasis on natural ventilation, a focus on creating an intermix of semi-indoor and semi-outdoor spaces, intermediate breather zones as well as congregation spaces combining the indoors with the outdoors. This trend will only continue to increase. In fact, in contrast to taking a back-seat, I would say that sustainability has actually received an endorsement push as a result of the safety concerns that have arisen due to the pandemic.
Can you see any elements in workplace design that will disappear?
With the advent of the work-from-home culture and the lessons people have learnt from being able to remotely coordinate via video-conferencing, file-sharing and by screen-sharing, we will increasingly see that conferences and meetings are going to be both in remote mode as well as hybrid mode. The earlier trend of people’s sole reliance on visiting the stakeholder’s office to have a meeting would gradually shift to an amalgamation of remote and in-person modes in near future. So, one area where people will devote less space to are large and numerous conference and meeting rooms.
The other very clear shift we are seeing in the interior planning for workplace design is the introduction of ‘single person meeting rooms’ wherein a professional sits in front of a responsive screen, perhaps connected to another part of the world. Therefore, the meeting rooms of the future would be hybrid, remote-working and sharing enabled. Another aspect that we already talked about, but is relevant here, is the switch from centralised access to spaces in buildings to more decentralised access, thereby moving away from security towards safety.