Institutional · Heritage Conservation · 2024

A Building That Remembers.

The restoration of a 1922 institutional building on Marina Promenade — stabilised, repaired and returned to daily use, without erasing a century of its own history.

Built 1922
Lady Wellingdon facade
Original colonnade
Lime plaster & timber railing, pre-intervention
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Location
Marina Promenade, Chennai
Built
1922
Scope
Conservation + PMC
Partner
Virtusa Foundation
Status
Completed 2024
The brief

Repair,
don't replace.

The building had stood for a century, and it showed — spalled plaster, water ingress through the parapet, timber members that had quietly failed behind intact-looking finishes. The instinct in most Indian institutional refurbishment is to demolish and rebuild. That was explicitly off the table here.

Conservation on this track means the repair has to be reversible, materially honest, and documented. Lime plaster matched to the original mix rather than cement render. Structural assessment before any load was touched. Every intervention recorded so a future conservator can see exactly what was done in 2024 and what has been there since 1922.

The second constraint was that the building had to keep working. It was never emptied — the restoration was sequenced around a live institution, in phases, so that teaching continued throughout. That is a project management problem as much as an architectural one.

Coordination model · interactive

Walk the building before it's touched.

Drag to orbit. Scroll to zoom. Isolate a floor, strip it back to wireframe, or explode the levels apart — the same model the site team and the heritage consultant worked from.

Drag to rotate · scroll to zoom Live 3D · WebGL
Why this matters — this is a real, interactive model running in the browser, not a video. On the live site the CMS accepts uploaded .glb files per project and generates the same orbit, level-isolation and wireframe controls automatically.
Project history

Eighteen months,
in five stages.

Project team

Who led this.

A building earns trust the same way a doctor does — by getting the details right when it actually matters.
F
Febin
Design Head & Managing Partner — Conservation lead
Good architecture is decided at the drawing board. Good buildings are decided on-site.
A
Ashik
Project Manager & Managing Partner — Delivery lead
Client
RedAnt understood exactly what we wanted before we did.
Amit ShahTrustee, Virtusa Foundation
Excellence in Heritage Conservation
Indian Institute of Architects · 2024
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