Back In The Limelight

With the New Delhi office of film production company Whitebalance Studio, Studio Bipolar illustrates just how a worn out structure can be intelligently reinvigorated in keeping with the needs of contemporary workspaces.

- Carol Ferrao

Often design complexity in program as well as site can either unravel you or push you to innovate like you never have before. When Studio Bipolar was entrusted to design the Whitebalance studio, principal architects Sanjana Mathur and Ujjwal Sagar had to wrestle with this question: How would a pharmaceutical warehouse translate into a contemporary workspace? Here was a site in New Delhi’s Okhla Industrial Area, abandoned since the 1960s and structured with a strictly utilitarian purpose, which now has to adapt to a creative film studio with a distinct pattern of working that differs from regular corporate culture.

But clients Robert Godinho and Gayatri Sethi, who reached out to the firm through a common acquaintance, were confident that Studio Bipolar would resolve the two exigent aspects creatively. It helped that both shared the same vision wherein they wanted to harness the structure’s history in creating this unique workspace. As an abandoned warehouse, the site didn’t make for an impressive canvas to begin with. “Even though the space looked very big in our plans, in real life, it was a series of small, low height interconnected rooms with almost no natural light,” explains Sanjana. “We got rid of all the partitions and mezzanines that divided the halls and opened them up for the first time in 50 years!”