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The freshly-coated walls in RPG House may not talk but they do say a lot about Chairman Harsh Goenka. His penchant for collecting art is evident in the large canvases that hang side-by-side here, on each floor of the office in Mumbai’s Worli. As part of a recent redesign, paintings that were once used to fill gaps have been given prominence to an extent that, at times, the employees and their workstations appear to be afterthoughts.
Built in 1974 by architect I M Kadri, RPG House is fashioned like a pink fort, an admiring nod to the Hawa Mahal in Jaipur. The last floor renovations had been undertaken in the 1990s. Although contemporary for their time, the interiors, sectioned by thick wooden cubicles and cabins, began seeming somewhat “fuddy-duddy” in time, Goenka observes. By contrast, the average management age at Ceat was growing younger at 28 years versus 45 years earlier. Additionally, rather than a staid commodity, Ceat’s tyres were being seen as a customer-focused product. So it was vital that the offices be overhauled, he says.
His team looked at a number of other offices before zeroing in on architect Ratan Batliboi for the project. Batliboi’s firm had worked, among others, with the Godrej and Tata families. Goenka also picked Elsie Nanji, managing partner at branding firm Red Lion, for styling tasks. Impressed by the way Nanji had decorated her own office, he had previously asked her to transform an executive lunch area at the office into a room for parties. Some ideas from that design, where the branding expert created unique spaces for artworks, have been carried over into other parts of the building now.
In its new avatar, the interiors of RPG House (which includes the group’s tyre and cable businesses) are mainly dark grey rather than white. This “blackboard-like” colour, Batliboi explains, does not reflect light and brings more attention to the paintings. The architect also knocked down cabins and tall partitions, going with a “socialistic” brief. “There was a time when the organisation worked in silos. This is a more open concept where you could be shouting across the aisle and conversing,” notes Goenka.
After management rooms around the corners were broken down, the floors became “one brightly-lit box”, observes Batliboi. Employees can now use the hitherto inaccessible terrace gardens, where mismatched chairs and pouffes form breakout spaces for meetings. But one would imagine that these areas will be avoided in summers. The low glass walls separating the workstations double up as a surface that employees use to jot down tasks with marker pens. Back from a trip, Jon Fletcher, senior vice-president of manufacturing at RPG Cables, says that the office feels a lot more transparent even inside the cabins.
Dividing the workspace from the breakout areas are horizontal wooden columns, three of which are coloured orange, evoking the “E” in Ceat so subtly that one might easily miss the reference. There are other attempts to incorporate the brand into the layout too. Overhead and table lamps, made to order by an artist in Puducherry, are streaked with skid marks. Local artists helped create 3D tread marks on the wall and a tree styled out of wires for the lobbies of the Ceat and RPG Cables offices respectively. More obviously, a few colourful tyres are strewn around for decoration.
Renovation work continues on one floor of the building. If employees are engaging with the art, it is likely happening on a subconscious level. Most of them predictably remain glued to computer screens and a few are seen bent over documents in the casual breakout area. RPG is not alone in its focus on bringing art to the workplace. Others, including Deutsche Bank and Citibank, have enviable collections too. As in those companies, the works here too are to be rotated and employees can request for a change if they wish. Goenka is considering a suggestion to hold art walks on weekends but that would be only once the revamp is complete.
