In the world of architecture, visionaries are those who shape not just spaces or architectures, but the way we experience the world around us. Deepak Taneja,
Mr. Deepak has been instrumental in leading some of the most groundbreaking projects in the industry with a career spanning more than 30 years. His passion for innovation, coupled with a deep understanding of architectural principles, has set him apart as a leader in his field.
Join ‘The Best Creators’ as we delve into the experience of Mr. Deepak Taneja, exploring his inspirations, challenges, and the future of architecture through his unique perspective. This editorial offers a glimpse into the world of a true architect of change, whose designs are not just structures, but stories waiting to be told.
Deepak Taneja have experience of more than 30 years in the field. He stated while briefing about his professional journey that my initial formative influences and learning was in the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi and that experience and that learning actually forms my main backbone of my working and my design style.
The methodology and the way of our pedagogical learning was our teachers, our faculty, and our peers and our classmates. We would be basically doing critical analysis of each person’s design, which we used to call crits, basically sitting in the cafeteria or anywhere anybody will go and show his design to it, any different faculty. So basically, we were able to get the views of different people, and that’s how we learned.
The important part of this school education, which is spa education, was there were lots of field trips to visit all the architectural marvels of India, as well as field trips to the construction sites to understand how construction happens. One of the mainstays of our learning is how construction actually happens.
He continued, then after college, I worked at many different places, like Niran Manchanda and since 2000, I have been with ARCOP. Now it’s almost 24 years in ARCOP, over the years I have worked on as a co partnership of architects. So we are now almost 250 architects over here. ARCOP has been in India for almost 50 years, we just celebrated our 50th anniversary.
The repertoire of our project basically consists of almost modern architectural marvels which have been created here and I have fortunately been involved in projects like institutes like Jaypee University of Information Technology (JUIT), Waknaghat, which is nestled in the Shivalik range of Himalayas, then hospitality projects, residential, commercial and pharmaceutical projects. So this is a small part of my journey.
Mr. Taneja said, “What is architecture? Architecture is basically the built environment all around us, so in a way we can say architecture is a part of our life. It’s an architectural environment where we work and reside. When we are walking around in society, the urban precincts, Its all architecture that is around us and life is what exactly happening in the built environment. The influences that we have are the influences created by this built environment. So, we have to always understand the architecture is basically to cater for this built environment, to take care of the requirements of the people and to give them those requirements, to fulfill their requirements.
On asking about his philosophies of work, Deepak replied that we have to think ‘what are you doing?’ You are creating an environment, the architecture of the environment, to suit the requirements of the user.
The client and the user are two important aspects. So we have to look both towards the client’s wish list, but also toward the user, who is going to ultimately use that place and over the years, architecture has progressed, the built environment has progressed, and that is basically fulfilling the different needs of the people. One of the examples we can say is Covid time has totally changed how we look at things, how we work, how we reside. Today, if you can see, the work environments have changed. People are working from their residences and creating small offices, and now things are again changing. People might be coming back to offices, but they might be coming back to an office in which there is a different sort of setup as architecture has to take care of all these changes which are happening. So as a philosophy, we should not stay constant, we should always keep evolving.
Mr. Deepak stated about things which were implemented in his organization to create efficiency in design exercises, he said that the process is the most critical part of the design. So, in ARCOP, our philosophy is to follow a process, and if you follow this process, then obviously we are creating efficiency, because then we are going on a path and taking care of each and every aspect as ‘I think process is the key. And setting up the right process finally gives you the result that you dream of and in fact the clients dream of’
The first initial stage would be understanding the requirements of the design and the users. For example, a project like a residential or a commercial or a hospitality will have a very exhaustive requirement. They will give us the number of rooms, even the size of the rooms, the size requirement of the washrooms, the restaurant spaces, the residential would give us exactly unit type configuration. So they are very exhaustive requirements. But some projects, like institutes, schools, there we are given a brief which basically consists of the educational areas and maybe administrative areas, the rest has to be developed, the storage spaces, the spaces for gathering of students or the people using the institutes. That has to be derived through our experience.
So that first part is a very important part to understand what is the requirement and how to basically assimilate the requirement into a number. Basically, we call the design brief. Then from there on we have sort of meetings with the clients and the users and basically take their aspirations. What are their aspirations about the project?
After we get all this, then the third stage starts the probe designs. Now as you can understand, each and every design can have multiple solutions. So probe design is an important flaw. We basically do two, three probe designs which have got different sorts of context, responses to the site, responses to the massing and everything which we take to the client. Now in the probe design we also take care of other things like site, climate, requirements, statutory requirements, understanding at that initial stage, and materials. By the time the client starts understanding, and even then, the client’s responses also increase because now they are able to visualize what they are asking, he comes back with his second level of his views then we go to the next stage.
Basically, we first get all these things sorted out in the probe design and concept design, also our design should take care of the local materials, the requirements of green energy efficiency that comes in our schematic design stages when we start building over there.
The design process has to use a lot of technological tools, SketchUp, Revit, DS max which are very critically utilized in our office. All the technological tools are obviously the ultimate to take care of the visual aspects over here.
Deepak Taneja said, if I will talk about challenges, I face during my professional journey then I have to consider every project as a challenge because if we don’t think it as a challenge, then our mind takes things as a mundane thing and we might not give it the best of our creative abilities. So every project has to be taken as a challenge and we have to deliver something different from other projects because if you are basically delivering a similar answer for every question, then that’s not what we are here for.
He continued, additionally I find the major challenges are ‘timelines and cost’ because following a timeline or deadline has become very important as time is money, our cost depends not only on our personal cost, in terms of office expenses, the more time we spend, obviously our costs are increasing.
Similarly, if there is a delay in the project, the cost of the client side is increasing. So timeline and cost are becoming very important aspects. So we have to follow an approach of scheduling. We have to work out the manpower, what is the amount of manpower required at every stage and we have to keep monitoring it, also one important thing is that what we try to do and what we should keep doing is from our past experiences of different projects.
Ultimately, recording the challenges and addressing them so that you are able to address those challenges in future and learning from the mistakes that you have been making.
To be continued >>