GANDHINAGAR - GUJARAT INTERNATIONAL FINANCE TEC-CITY (GIFT) | Diamond Tower | 400 m | 1312 ft | 87 floors -- The crown of India's new megaproject financial center!

Diamond Tower, Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT), Gandhinagar, India

…India’s tallest commercial tower, and the crowning masterpiece of India’s future financial metropolis!

The Diamond Tower is crowning centerpiece of India’s largest greenfield megaproject, the Gujarat International Finance Tech-City The 87-floor Diamond Tower will be India’s largest commercial tower and is the largest announced tower in the GIFT skyline.

^ A beautifully faceted showpiece supertall, the Diamond Tower on the Gift Waterfront. All pics in this article courtesy ECADI Architects and GIFT

Before I go on about the Diamond Tower, its necessary to give some background on the GIFT project itself:

Located at Gandhinagar, the capital city of the über-industrial Indian state of Gujarat, and nearby the state’s commercial capital of Ahmedabad, the Gujarat International Finance Tec-City will be one of the world’s largest and most modern financial hubs.

From its already lofty original development goals, GIFT has since grown manifold to literally an entire city’s central business district that will be larger than Paris’s La Defense, Tokyo’s Shinjuku, London’s Dockyards and Shanghai’s Pudong financial districts. It will house over a million people with millions more commuting there daily.

Well placed between the political and commercial capitals of Gujarat of Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad respectively, GIFT is a public-private partnership basically designed to kick Mumbai in the FDI balls and establish itself as a world player. It is India’s first major supertall Central Business District project that is designed to be the focal point of both the world’s and India’s booming financial services market by providing companies with all those things Mumbai is still developing: comprehensive infrastructure, power, verticalized office space, and a well designed, planned and expandable urban form. Its strong proximity and infrastructure connectivity with Mumbai ensures that mutually beneficial development occurs between the two metros..

^ An overhead view of the new GIFT CBD. Only half the planned buildings are shown in the above rendering

The scale of GIFT is singularly massive, unparalleled in the world except a handfull of Dubai megaprojects, none of those which can hold a candle to GIFT’s goals of economic sustainability, integration and scalability.

Gujarat International Finance Tec-City will have 312 tall buildings — the tallest being the signature Diamond Tower with 87 floors; another 40 buildings with more than 50 floors and many more with 24 plus floors of height. The entire project is not only fully approved but already completely sold out due to insane demand. Construction will begin later this year.

For more information on GIFT as a whole, please check out the GIFT thread in General Urban Developments forum for a summary of the main developments and the GIFT thread in the SSC India forum for more detailed discussions.

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OK, now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the majestic Diamond Tower

… for tons more more information, renderings, details and images of the other proposed designs to GIFT and the tower, read on!

^ Diamond Tower seen from the view corridor over one of GIFT’s many greenbelts

Designed by ECADI Architects, the master planners of many of Shanghai’s newest projects, Diamond Tower was designed as the centerpiece signature tower that will cap the new GIFT CBD skyline. The tower is called “The Diamond Tower” to mark Gujarat state’s eminence as the diamond capital of the world. It takes its design cues from the cut facets of a traditional Indian-cut diamond and is a tip of the hat to the state’s diamond industry, which had initially fueled much of Gujarat’s industrialization and still remains a huge economic stimulus to the state.

^ A closeup of the Diamond Tower’s diamond-like crown.

The Diamond Tower is designed to convey both the brightness and shape of the diamond. The various cuts and facets in the tower’s shape are designed to reflect and refract the light on the tower similar to a cut diamond, helping it achieve its goal of being one of the world’s brightest and most eye-catching towers when it catches the light of the sun..

t is the only tower located on block (or in GIFT development parlance “Package”, in reference to each site being a separate instance of public-private development partnerships) “Package D“, the only tower package on Fortune Island, which also will have a huge waterfront public green space as well as a museum and convention center. The tower will be accessible by foot by a bridge spanning the river as well as the gamut of GIFT’s public transport system..

The tower actually went through a major design change from its initial proposal.

^ The original, shard-like design of the Diamond Tower

Initially, the tower was far more shard-like and sculpture-esque in its form, and at 80 floors rose significantly higher than the surrounding skyline:

^ The location of the old design Diamond Tower to the old GIFT city plan

^ More views of the old design of the Diamond Tower

THowever, after the office space of the original GIFT master plan completely sold out less than a week after its opening it was realized that even this huge project severely underestimated the demand for high-quality commercial development in Gujarat. Thus, all the buildings went through a major redesign, scaled upward in both mass and in height — the signature Diamond Tower being no exception.

^ The new design of the Diamond Tower framed by the new Gateway Towers

After sifting through tens of proposals by ECADI, the private-public development consortium finally chose the new design of the Diamond Tower. The new tower is significantly taller, with 87 floors and a 400 meter height (possibly higher if one counts the crown as a spire.) The impression the tower gives is that of a rock-solid jewel rising over a much more aggressive and massive skyline, rather than the delicate crystal shard complementing an equally visually delicate skyline of the older design plan.

^ The Diamond Tower, Gateway Towers and Crystal Towers

The tower has been completely approved by all governing and oversight bodies and will be constructed in the first phase of the project. Construction is expected to begin later this year, but may be put on hold if more redesigns/upscaling of the project is in the offing.

-Felonious Vindaloo

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