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Architecture

24-06-2026

Text provided by the Architect

India has been building in sandstone for five hundred years. Then, for approximately fifty, it stopped.

The stoppage was not dramatic. It happened gradually, as aluminium composite panels became cheaper to specify than stone, as curtain wall systems arrived with warranties and installation manuals. The glass box, imported wholesale from climates nothing like ours, became the default language of Indian commercial architecture. Air conditioning compensated for everything the wall no longer did.

This building houses the corporate office of an industrial manufacturer in Sonipat, Haryana. The brief was functional, the budget modest, the site unglamorous. A plot adjacent to a working factory floor in a Haryana industrial estate. Nothing about the commission announced itself as an opportunity for argument. From the road, it reads as a single block of stone.

No reveals. No articulation. White Dholpur sandstone in coursed ashlar, horizontal lines running unbroken across the facade, mortar joints thin and consistent, the surface flat and certain. In the industrial landscape of Sonipat, where corrugated sheds and boundary walls compete with signage and security cameras, the restraint of a stone block registers as authority. It stands there while everything around it negotiates.

Cut into this apparently solid block are three courtyards, one rising the full three floors, one two floors, one a single storey. Each glazed at the top, each pulling daylight down through the building's section to the floors below. From inside, these voids are the building's lungs. On a clear Haryana morning, the light that falls through a glazed roof into a sandstone-lined court is specific and irreproducible, diffuse, warm, the kind of light that the stone seems to generate rather than merely receive. Ninety percent of regularly occupied spaces achieve sDA300/50%, receiving more than 300 lux of daylight for more than half the occupied day. No ceiling luminaire produces light of this quality.

Sonipat,Haryana,India

Architects	:	AGXDS Architects
Area	:	6500 sq. ft.
Year of Completion	:	2025
Website	:	https://www.instagram.com/agxdsarchitects/

Exterior view of Antara by AGXDS Architects

The section is therefore a sequence of compressions and releases. Mass, then void. Stone, then sky. A three-floor court that arrives with the verticality of a well, then a two-floor court more intimate in scale, then a single-storey void where the glazing is close enough overhead that the sky reads as a surface rather than an abstraction. This is the spatial intelligence of the traditional Indian haveli, the alternation of enclosure and openness, shade and light, translated into the section of a contemporary workplace. The building borrows nothing of the imagery of those precedents. It borrows their atmospheric logic entirely.

The facade's coursing rhythm is not arbitrary. The horizontal joint intervals were derived from the talamana, the ancient Indian proportional canon by which temple sculptors set out the body of a deity from crown to foot in precise modular relationships. Those intervals, translated into the varying heights of sandstone courses, produce a facade that the eye moves across with particular ease. The variation is subtle enough that most observers would not identify it consciously. But the eye registers it. The facade has a rhythm rather than a pattern.

Against this mass, mild steel does what stone cannot. Oxide-finished columns hold a roof plane that floats above the entrance. Fixed horizontal fins; calculated against sun angles at latitude 28.9° North, throw precise shadows across the glazed bays without sensors, without motors, without maintenance. The steel is new. The stone is ancient. The conversation between them is the architecture.

Steel Shading Fin System of Antara by AGXDS Architects

The sandstone does not stop at the perimeter. Interior partition frames and window surrounds continue the same stone vocabulary, dressed by the same craftsmen who laid the exterior wall, cut on site against the actual opening rather than a shop drawing. Every profiled element, mullion, lintel, and surround was custom-fabricated because no standard section existed for the required geometry. The mason's skill was the specification.

Metal and Stone Wall of Antara by AGXDS Architects

Open to Sky Courtyard of Antara by AGXDS Architects

Courtyard of Antara by AGXDS Architects

The numbers followed the convictions. Peak cooling load sits 34% below an unshaded conventional baseline. The Energy Performance Index of 120 kWh/m² is 19% below the standard case, producing annual energy savings of approximately ₹56,000 before accounting for reduced mechanical plant capital cost. With rooftop photovoltaics, the building reaches net positive energy performance. The embodied carbon of locally quarried sandstone, minimal processing, 250 kilometres of transport, and site fabrication is a fraction of any aluminium cladding system. The most carbon-efficient wall available to a builder in North India is the same wall that has been available for five hundred years.

Outside reads ancient. Inside reads discovered. That gap between what the building presents and what it contains is the concept.

A stone block that the city reads as solid. Cut through with light. Organised by the proportional memory of Indian sacred making. Performing at an energy index, the simulation did not expect until the wall proved it.