Vestal Manufacturers

What was built

This is a brass hardware factory: a building whose real programme is the raw-material manufacturing pipeline, with the machinery placement and process architecture decided first and the rooms arranged around it. The office layer is complete in itself, with a director cabin, reception, conference room, manager rooms, accounts rooms, rest rooms and a display area for finished product. On a 10,000 sq yd plot the design question is where the process sits and how the offices serve it, and that is what the plan answers.

How an engagement like this runs

An industrial engagement starts from the machinery list, not the elevation. Presentation drawings resolve the process line and its clearances; working drawings set out machinery placement, floor loadings and truck movement; structural drawings carry the bays and the crane or machine foundations; MEP handles power and process water. Supervision then checks the line against the drawing through construction, because a deviation in a process building is a production problem, not just a construction one.

This is the practice’s standing method for the type, not a claim about this project. The stage sequence and payment triggers are on how we work.

Where this record stands

The practice’s archive is being documented project by project. For this entry, the record holds location, year, scale, the recorded brief; still to be documented are photographs from the practice archive, the client consent that allows story and photographs to publish.

This type of work

Factory buildings and process architecture. Aligarh is a brass-hardware manufacturing centre, and the practice has worked in that industry since 2002.