Site-Specific: Number Eight

Number 8 is a twelve-story corporate building in Noida, where I was invited to engage with its constituent elevators, embodying within their own spatial characters, functional purpose and technical constraints. Here, in this site-specific project, the functional elevator becomes a space of perceptual interruption, where a familiar space is subtly altered without losing its primary function and yet becomes potent enough to shift perceptions.

An enclosed stainless steel-clad space, meant to be in continuous motion and laden with a huge influx of people continuously moving between the floors, it also demanded certain restraints, such as being lightweight enough as a non-negotiable parameter. Stainless Steel sheets were laser-cut to precise measurements as per the native wall of the elevators, and then folded through the process of origami. Put atop the original elevator walls, certain corners of these wall panels of identical material jut outwards at an off-perpendicular angle, deliberately making the viewer experience a certain sense of unease and disorientation. Further, sculptures were also added to activate the corners and draw attention to these subtle architectural shifts. Thereby it invokes viewers to notice the shift in inherent knowledge of one’s surroundings.

Elevator A