Singapore-based design studio WOW Architects received the ‘Commercial Building of the Year Award’ for the Vivanta Hotel in Bangalore, India at the 2012 Emirates Glass LEAF Awards, which took place during this year’s London Design Festival.
The entire design process of Vivanta Hotel began by understanding the cultural, economic and geo-climatic context of the Bangalore area. Located at the entrance of the new Bangalore International Tech Park, Vivanta Hotel is a landmark for local and visitor populace, and to act as an interface between the new IT park and the fast-developing city around it, providing one of the first models of work/play environments in India.
The building was commissioned by the Taj Group of Hotels, under a new label that would cater to the current trends and changing tastes of a younger and more design-savvy generation of hotel users and business travellers. Taj’s ambition presented the designers with considerable aesthetic and theoretical free rein, receiving a development strategy that has resulted in a unique combination of contemporary space building and high-end technology set within landscaped grounds.
Because of the low mass dictated by the urban design guidelines and the mild climate of Bangalore, a strong landscape strategy was chosen as the concept driver, then, in order to tap into the mindset and profile of the expected client base, the hotel was to deliberately zestful in spirit and dynamic in design where the building itself was formed by a simple conceptual ‘twist and fold’ of the ground plane to create a conceptual endless ‘promenade’ of spatial experiences, with green flowing up to the roof of the building and blurring the distinction between the building starts and the ground ends. The luxury Indian hotel was thus conceived of as a ‘landscraper’ that becomes essentially an experientially rich hospitality space where public and private functions flow and connect to each other and cinematic treatments of the hotel places increase guest movements and interaction.
