The Glass Box Doesn't Belong Here
Chennai's summers are not a design inconvenience. They are the single most important fact about this city, architecturally speaking.
Hot. Humid. A high, unforgiving sun for most of the year.
For generations, our buildings answered that reality directly. Deep verandahs. Jaali screens. Generous overhangs that buffered the outer skin of a building from its interior, cutting solar heat gain before it ever reached the occupant. None of it was decorative. It was thermal strategy, refined over decades by architects responding to a very specific brief: this city, this climate, these people.
What We Built, and Why It Worked
My husband and I are both architects. We often find ourselves noticing buildings while driving through the city—along Anna Salai, Royapettah, Guindy and beyond. Some of the most intelligently designed office façades are still there, half-hidden today behind signboards and posters. We still marvel at how carefully they were conceived, and how precisely they responded to the context they were built in.
Concrete fins projecting just far enough to cast shade. Deep-set windows sitting permanently in shadow. A secondary skin standing away from the façade, intercepting heat before it reaches the glass.
[Image: Older office buildings with fins, deep-set windows and jaali screens. Photographs: Prathyusha Ravi]
These weren't isolated examples, or the work of a handful of visionary architects. They reflected a shared understanding of how buildings in this city should behave—precision, when the brief is climate. Every device here solves the same equation: keep the sun out before it becomes heat inside.
Somewhere Along the Way, We Stopped Asking the Question
Walk through many commercial districts in Chennai today and the story has changed.
Glass façades have quietly become the default language of commercial workplace architecture. Wall to wall. Regardless of orientation, sun angle, or the fact that we are not Frankfurt or London.
[Image: Contemporary glass office building]
Somewhere along the way, we began importing not just technologies but architectural images. As businesses went global, our office buildings aspired to look global too. The problem was never modernisation itself—it's that appearance travelled more easily than the reasoning behind it. Glass curtain walls became synonymous with office architecture in many temperate regions, where their performance characteristics made far more sense than they do in Chennai's climate.
The sequence that follows is predictable. The envelope generates heat load the building never needed to carry. Air-conditioning works harder to compensate. Costs rise. Then, often, the project is submitted for green certification—measured against a baseline the building itself inflated the moment it chose glass over shade.
It's an expensive way of solving a problem the building created for itself.
Buildings Should Breathe Too
Responsive architecture isn't only about keeping heat out. It's about making intelligent use of what the site already offers. Chennai sits on the coast. The sea breeze is one of our greatest environmental assets, yet many commercial buildings are sealed boxes, leaning entirely on mechanical systems for comfort.
For decades, architects here understood how to move air through a building—courtyards, shaded transition spaces, pressure differences, carefully positioned openings, the Venturi effect. Designing in response to context, climate and the people who inhabit a space was once the default—the natural and responsible way of working. Today it has become the exception, practised by only a select few.
Design for the Building's Actual Life
The bottom line is simple: design for function, context, and the people who will actually use the space. Tailor the building to them—don't force the users, or the climate, to adapt to a building never suited to either. Deep-set windows. Thoughtfully oriented openings. Jaali screens that filter glare while letting in daylight. Buildings that work with the climate instead of constantly fighting it. There was real care in how workplace architecture here used to be conceived—not because it looked regional, but because it performed regionally.
[Image: Our residential project showing the same buffer-zone logic translated into a contemporary setting]
The Climate Hasn't Gone Anywhere
Chennai's climate hasn't disappeared. If anything, it's become more demanding. Cotton still absorbs heat and cools us better than synthetic fabric ever will. Shaded spaces are still naturally better suited to this climate than a glass wall with blinds pulled across it to cut the glare. Some truths don't become obsolete simply because technology advances. That isn't a reason to return to yesterday's architecture. It's a reason to return to yesterday's way of thinking.
We now have better materials, environmental simulations, fabrication techniques and responsive façade systems than ever before. The question isn't whether we have the technology. It's whether we're asking the right questions. Let's design with greater care, using these tools to build with more precision, greater purpose and a deeper awareness of where we're building—and for whom. Too many of our buildings today could belong almost anywhere. That's precisely the problem.
We should bring back our architectural specificity—not by copying old forms, but by recovering the questions that shaped them. A good place to start: Chennai's older office buildings. Not to imitate, but to understand their logic. They were designed to respond, not restrict.
Responsive architecture shouldn't be the exception. In a city like Chennai, it should be the norm. Technology should serve context—not replace it.
