The Drawing Floor

A studio floor for 44 people, planned around the acoustic problem first and the desks second.

Project: 03
Year: 2023
Location: Viman Nagar, Pune
Area: 5,800 SQ FT
Type: Commercial
Duration: 19 WEEKS

The brief

An architecture practice had outgrown a floor plate where every meeting happened at somebody's desk. They asked for more meeting rooms. Their real problem was that a room full of people talking about drawings is loud, and that they had a 3.4-metre exposed slab with nothing on it to absorb anything.

The approach

We treated the ceiling before we drew a single desk. A baffle field of felt panels across sixty percent of the slab took the reverberation time from 1.9 seconds to just under 0.7, which is the difference between a room where you raise your voice and one where you do not. Only after that did the desk plan get set — long shared benches rather than pods, which is what the practice actually wanted but could not have tolerated acoustically before.

Circulation runs on a single spine down the north edge, so nobody crosses a working zone to reach a meeting room or the kitchen. The four enclosed rooms are pushed to the south wall where the glare was worst and the desks could not go anyway. Two of them are bookable; two are deliberately not, so there is always somewhere to take a call without planning ahead.

Everything below waist height is specified for wear rather than appearance: linoleum floors, ply-faced storage with exposed edges, powder-coated steel legs. The practice moves furniture constantly. Nothing here is damaged by being dragged.