Time for a quick quiz. Which structure has over 7 million square feet of office space, houses nearly 70,000 workers, and ranks as the largest office building in the world? If you guessed the Pentagon, then you’re wrong. In November 2023, the title of world’s largest office was taken from the Potomac Polygon and handed to this gigantic new development developments in the Indian city of Surat. Thousands of offices, 10,000 square meters of restaurants and cafes, parking for 5,000 cars and 10,000 motorbikes, 131 elevators, nine courtyard gardens, retail outlets and conference halls are all built across this 35-acre high security compound. A structure this size is a true milestone for India’s construction industry. And with a long list of specialist requirements and a pandemic to contend with, building it was no mean feat. In an age of hybrid work, where office buildings are sitting empty around the world, this enormous edifice had guaranteed full occupancy before a single piece of rebar was placed. in a building this big.
This is the story of how and why India built the world’s largest office. If you’ve ever bought a diamond, or are lucky enough to have been given one, the chances are it came through here. This is Surat, in the western Indian state of Gujarat, where a whopping 90% of the world’s diamonds are cut and polished. But as big as this industry is for the city, it has a problem. Rough stones arrive in Surat, where they are processed in one of the thousands of small workshops spread around the city. Most of the finished products are then collected by merchants who travel to Mumbai, over 200km away, where the diamonds are traded and sent around the world. It’s not exactly efficient, and it would be much better for everyone if the whole business could take place in one city. Or for that matter, in one building. That’s why a group of nearly 5,000 of the city’s diamond businesses got together to form the SDB, Surat Diamond Bourse. And this is what they commissioned. This enormous US$388 million building was designed to house India’s entire diamond industry under one roof. That’s cutters and polishers from Surat and merchants and traders from Mumbai. 4,700 offices containing 67,000 people. But where do you even start when designing a building this big? Do you go for a skyscraper? Well, the problem with this is with such a huge volume of people entering and leaving through a relatively small space, it’s a really inefficient way to manage the flow of people.
Plus, because the SDB is organised along the lines of a guild, all the businesses it represents have equal status. So, anything that resembles a hierarchy is kind of out of the picture. What about a huge office block instead? Well, there you might run into the problem of lights. Each office needs access to daylight, which is the best quality for viewing diamonds in. So anything with a deep floor plan is no good. Okay, what about a big donut? Well, there you have the problem of too much of a good thing. Any office facing east or west would get blasted by direct sunlight, forcing anyone inside to pull down the blinds and flick the light switch. So, let’s recap. It needs to be big enough to cope with the flow of tens of thousands of people and have perfectly consistent light conditions across all floors. Oh, and be able to cope with Surat’s stifling humid heat and monsoon rain. That’s the challenge that was presented to architects more for Genesis.
They began by tackling the vast numbers of people the building had to serve. We’d never done anything close to this before. And we were looking at this and wondering how are we going to get people in and out of a building that’s 7 million square feet. They’re all going to come in at within a span of an hour in the morning and they’re all going to leave in a span of an hour in the evening. To deal with this, the architects set a target that any employee could reach their office within seven minutes of entering the gates. So we started thinking about it inside out and we did a lot of tracking simulation, the security simulation of what would that structure be. And it sort of turned out to be this sort of fishbone vertebra kind of plan, which of course is a very efficient way of distributing nerve signals from the brain to the rest of the body. And it’s a very efficient method of in nature. Nine 15-story towers flank a 400-meter central spine. As well as speeding up access by aligning the building north to south, it also solved the tricky problem of lighting.
The heights of each of those stars and the distances between them, which are connected by the spine, the distance between them are calculated so that the office at the bottom also gets 100 percent daylight and it doesn’t get overshadowed. The building’s spine also helps it cope with the extreme climate. Each end flares out to catch the prevailing winds, which are funneled through the complex and provide 50% of the building’s cooling needs. The communal spaces in the spine and courtyards are also essential for creating the environment that diamond traders are used to. The traders, they don’t actually sit around in conference room.
They carry these diamonds in their little packets in their pockets and they sit under a tree, have a cup of tea and the trade is done. So that’s the design, but how on earth do you actually build something this big? Well, after ground broke in December 2017, it took 6,000 people four and a half years to construct this gigantic building. But the biggest challenge faced was undoubtedly during COVID. As global supply chains dried up, the vast quantities of materials needed to continue construction had to be sourced a lot closer to home.
We said localize all the materials. Only materials that are within a 500km radius that we can get access to. The ceilings were all manufactured in a place called Morby nearby. We designed and built an on-site fabrication plant for making the unitized glazing. And so just raw glass was coming in from a factory nearby and this on-site plant was manufacturing fully unitized units.
As big as the STB is, this is only the first phase of an even bigger plan called Dream City, a 7 square kilometer smart city providing even more housing and offices all for the diamond industry. But this future may not be so glistening. The global economic downturn along with the Ukraine war has hit the jewel market hard. Earlier this year, 20,000 people in the industry lost their jobs due to a fall in trade. But regardless of what happens with the wider economy, this building has already taken on a life of its own and become an iconic structure for a proud public.
It has got architecture conversation in everyday life, which really wasn’t the case in India. We see that it began to drive tourism. People want to visit it, want to go and study it. I mean, now you can call a tourist operator and they’ve got Sura Diamond Bourse as one of the things that you should go and… I mean, go and visit. I think after two years of pandemic, everyone sort of… I think it’s just sort of given people a symbol, not just a vision. So I think in some senses, it’s been really good that way.
