Pune: Ahoy! Infosys 'spaceship' lands in Pune

Abhay Vaidya
[ 6 Sep, 2006 0019hrs IST TIMES NEWS NETWORK ]

PUNE: Indian IT giant Infosys Technologies, which has grabbed many a headline in software development, is now set to make waves in architecture.

On September 18, the company will inaugurate the first of its two "spaceships" in Pune — a gigantic, five-storey steel-glass-aluminium clad building that resembles a spacecraft and will house 3,000 professionals.

Truly unique among the thousands of buildings in Pune, if not India, the structure, designed by eminent architect Hafeez Contractor, looks like a spaceship that has just descended on Earth.

Gung-ho over Infosys' Pune operations, which celebrated the crossing of a 10,000 head count last week, Priti Rao, head of Infosys' Pune Development Centre described the building as a "spacecraft that will launch us in the next orbit."

Rao's excitement is understandable as Infosys (Pune) has seen a robust growth of 60-65 per cent over last year and expects the growth and expansion to continue in the next three years.

Broadly satisfied with Pune's infrastructure as compared to Bangalore, Infosys, which has invested Rs 270 crore here over the last three years, sees considerable potential for expansion as it has developed just 24 hectares of its 55-hectare land.

The company's 'spacecraft' is a part of this growth story and is set to be inaugurated by Infosys director and chief financial officer T.V. Mohandas Pai.

The building has 1.5 lakh sq.ft of floor space over five floors. Its form has been derived from an ellipsoid and the structure is meant to speak the hi-tech language of computers, software development and cutting-edge technology.

According to structural designer Dhananjay Dake of the Pune-based Construction Catalysers, which collaborated with Hafeez Contractor in this project, the partially-cut ellipsoid measures 105 metres along its longer axis and 65m along its shorter axis, rising to a height of 35m and tilting at an angle of 10 degrees.

It is this tilt that gives the new Infosys building in Pune the look of a descending spacecraft as "one of its ends appears to be buried into the ground and the other is lifted up".

Dake has been invited to give a presentation on the construction to the Forum for Exchange and Excellence in Design (FEED, Pune).

According to him, pre-stressed grid cell geometry was employed as a part of the innovative architectural engineering that went into this creation.