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Luxury offices in Delhi suburb use laminated glass to help lure tenants

The laminated glass façade of the DLF Plaza in Delhi has helped the building attract a wide range of multinational tenants.

A luxury office block in the suburbs of Delhi has used a 5,000 m2 curtainwall façade of reflective laminated glass as part of a successful bid to lure multinational tenants to the building. Developers DLF of Delhi worked closely with one of India's best-known architectural firms. Munbai-based Hafeez Contractor, to design the 12-story DLF Plaza - which incidentally features a swimming pool and health club on the roof.

Chief Architect at DLF, Anil Gupta told LGN: "The attractive, Super Silver Dark Blue^® Glaverbel float glass of the façade is kept distortion-free by the outer layer of laminated glass. Aside from this, we selected laminated glass primarily for safety reasons. In case of breakage, there is no risk of broken shards falling from a great height down onto the street and there is no hurry to replace the panes since they stay in the frames. This allows business to carry on as usual if repair cannot be effected for a few days".

"Sound insulation was another important factor, since the DLF Plaza is located in a busy street - and the solar control qualities of the tinted, reflective laminated glass that we used cut air conditioning costs." Gupta noted that Indian architects are switching from PVC/epoxy interlayer to laminated glass with conventional PVB for curtainwall facades due mainly to the safety, sound attenuation and distortion-free benefits that laminated glass with PVB brings.

The DLF Plaza opened in 1998 and has attracted many blue chip multinational companies like British Airways, SmithKline Beecham, ICA - and DuPont!