Suzlon One Earth Case Study: Campus Plan, Climate and Green Rating (Christopher Benninger)

Suzlon One Earth is the global headquarters of Suzlon Energy, the wind turbine maker, in Hadapsar, Pune. Christopher Charles Benninger and his Pune practice, CCBA, designed it as a campus of low office blocks around a central garden and a sunken water court, and it was completed in October 2009. It holds LEED Platinum and a GRIHA five-star rating. Below: the brief, site, plan, section, materials, climate strategy, the energy figures as each source publishes them (they do not agree), and what designers can take from it.

Suzlon One Earth: the facts

Architect: Christopher Charles Benninger, CCBA (credited as CCBA Designs by ArchDaily, with a team led by Jagdeesh Taluri, Sushilkumar Khairnar and Daraius Choksi among others).

Conceived and managed by: Synefra Engineering & Construction, a Tanti Group company. Other credits (ArchDaily and GRIHA): Environmental Design Solutions (green building and energy), Spectral Services Consultants (MEP), Vastech (structure), Vascon Engineers (prime contractor), Ravi and Varsha Gavandi (landscape), Space Matrix and Tao Architects (interiors).

Client: Suzlon Energy Limited. Location: One Earth, Hadapsar, Pune 411028, Maharashtra.

Dates: designed from 2005 (CCBA's 2009 project text) or 2006 (CCBA's site gives 2006 to 2009); completed October 2009; LEED Platinum citation presented in Washington DC in April 2010; GRIHA five-star final rating on a sheet dated May 2013.

Type: corporate headquarters for about 2,300 people. Site: 45,392 sq m (GRIHA), given elsewhere as 10.4 acres or 41,000 sq m. Built-up area: 70,865 sq m (GRIHA); other sources give 762,785 sq ft, 816,171 sq ft and "a million" sq ft. Height: ground plus two floors, the Corporate House ground plus three.

Cost: Rs 280 crore (US$63 million) in 2009, as listed by ArchDaily.

Status: in use as Suzlon's headquarters, sold in 2024 and leased back. No Commons photograph cleared our licence checks, so this post uses MOA diagrams only.

Architect of Suzlon One Earth, and the brief

Christopher Charles Benninger was born in Ohio and lived most of his life in India. According to Wallpaper's obituary (10 October 2024), he co-founded the School of Planning at what is now CEPT University in Ahmedabad in 1971, alongside B V Doshi, set up the Centre for Development Studies and Activities in Pune in 1976, and died in Pune on 2 October 2024.

The client was a wind energy company that wanted its building to match its product. The architects' text on ArchDaily (published 14 January 2014) says Suzlon and the architect "pledged to create the greenest office in India", and that Benninger compared the Tanti family, whose Tulsi Tanti chaired the Suzlon Group, to the Sarabhais, the Guggenheims and the Rockefellers as patrons of architecture. CCBA's own project page adds that water, energy, air, sewage and trash were to be managed on site, with nothing removed from it.

In the architects' description in MGS Architecture, the campus had to bring all of Suzlon's business verticals together, each able to run on its own, and the client's needs changed "almost from week to week" during design. That explains much of the plan.

Site and context: Hadapsar, Pune

CCBA's 2009 project text on WorldArchitecture describes a suburban site of 10.4 acres in Pune, "about 100 miles from Mumbai", with temperatures from 25 to 40 °C between winter and summer. It says the blocks were kept to ground plus two floors to keep the scale of the neighbourhood, with only the Corporate House rising to ground plus three.

Sources label Pune's climate differently: hot and dry (the architects), hot and humid (bigEE) and warm and humid (CSE's 2014 benchmark analysis). For what it means for an ordinary house, see our guide to building materials in Pune.

Suzlon One Earth architecture: the concept

The architects set the campus against the glass office tower, calling it a "land scraper" and "a counter blast to 'the glass box'". Their models are Fatehpur Sikri and the Meenakshi Temple complex in Madurai, from which they take overhangs, louvres, pergolas, courtyards, water and daylight.

Three ideas carry the design:

A low, spread-out campus of long, thin blocks, so daylight and air reach the desks.
A centre open to the sky: the design began with a central Brahmasthan, a "secret internal garden" visible from everywhere.
Water as the focus: a Deepa Stambh (lamp pillar) in a reflecting pool.

Suzlon One Earth plan and site plan

The plan answers the changing brief with a system rather than a fixed layout. The architects describe a simple arrangement of server spaces and served spaces:

Served spaces are the offices, which take most of the floor area. They are "cold shells" planned on 8.4 by 8.4 metre modules, ready for modular walls and furniture that can change.
Server spaces are rigid cores holding wet areas, utility shafts, ducts, fire stairs, lifts, entries and reception, which are not expected to change.

The architects compare these modules, the silo-like fire stairs and the glass cylinders to a Lego set. The glass cylinders, at the circulation nodes, bring daylight and plants down to the basement entries and help ventilate the basement parking.

Schematic zoning diagram of Suzlon One Earth: long pink office blocks of ground plus two floors wrap a green central garden called the Brahmasthan; dark red squares mark the fixed service cores at the corners and along the blocks; white circles mark glass cylinders at the corners of the garden; inside the garden a sunken blue reflecting pool holds the Deepa Stambh, with a cascade of three tiers behind it and the cafeteria opening onto it at basement level; a linear basin runs east past the taller Corporate House to a fountain; a small pool in the west block marks the Wind Lounge — Flexible office shells (served spaces) wrap a central garden open to the sky, with fixed cores (server spaces) and glass cylinders at the joints, and water at the centre. Positions are illustrative, from the architects' description. Diagram: MOA

The central garden is the plaza for about 2,300 people. The reflecting pool sits at basement level, so the cafeteria and dining room open onto the water, with a cascade down three tiers behind and a long basin running east to a fountain. Elsewhere, the Wind Lounge is a chowk with kund-like steps down to a pool, shaded by solar panels that let filtered light through. Some searches call it the "Sun Lounge"; the architects call it the Wind Lounge, and we found no source for the other name.

Our diagram shows the zoning idea only. For the real site plan, floor plans, sections and elevations, see the drawings in the ArchDaily project gallery and CCBA's page. If you are documenting it for a studio, our case study field checklist covers what to record on site.

Section and structure

The section is where the climate strategy shows. The architects say the louvres, overhangs and operable windows led to "lower, thinner and longer" blocks, which raise the ratio of window to volume and so bring more daylight and air inside. The GRIHA case-study sheet lists facades facing north, south, north-west and south-east, external louvres shading all first- and second-floor windows, blocks that partly shade each other, and small terraces.

Schematic section of Suzlon One Earth: a block of ground plus two floors under a deep overhanging roof, with louvres outside the first and second floors, a dashed arrow of cross ventilation through operable windows and a sun ray of filtered daylight; small wind turbines and solar panels on the roof; a basement for parking runs under the whole site; a glass cylinder carries light and air down to the basement; beside it, a sunken court where the cafeteria opens onto a reflecting pool at basement level, with a tall Deepa Stambh standing in the water and a cascade stepping down three tiers; notes list fly-ash block walls, double glazing, water-cooled VRV cooling and evaporative cooling — The section principle as the sources describe it: thin blocks shaded by louvres and overhangs, slabs post-tensioned to save concrete and steel, and a sunken water court that brings daylight to the basement cafeteria. Diagram: MOA

The structure is concrete with post-tensioned slabs, which GRIHA credits with 37% less structural concrete and 50% less structural steel; the baseline behind those percentages is not published.

Materials used in Suzlon One Earth

The architects say they "relied exclusively on non-toxic and recycled materials". The published specifics are fewer than that claim suggests:

Walls: GRIHA lists "siporex fly-ash blocks" for better insulation. bigEE, the buildings guide of the Wuppertal Institute, describes 200 mm fly-ash brick with 20 mm cement plaster on each side, with a U-value of 2.04 W per sq m K. Our comparison of red brick, AAC, fly ash and concrete block explains how these blocks differ.
Glazing: double glazed, U-value 1.80 W per sq m K, solar heat gain coefficient 0.35 (bigEE).
Skin: aluminium louvres over the glass, which the architects call a protective skin that admits daylight and cross ventilation.
Roof: over-deck insulation (Synefra), under roofs with wide overhangs, as the architects' photographs show.

Light, climate and services

The architects say 75% of workstations have daylight and views out; Suzlon's 2010 release, on CSRwire, says about 90% of regularly occupied spaces get daylight. Both are design claims, not surveys. Lighting runs on daylight and occupancy sensors, and every desk has an LED light on a motion sensor (GRIHA).

The offices are air-conditioned. bigEE describes a water-cooled VRV system of about 1,000 tonnes of refrigeration, a fresh-air unit on every floor supplying 100% fresh air, and set points of 26 °C in summer and 23 °C in winter, with evaporative cooling in reception areas. GRIHA adds pre-cooling of fresh air and heat recovery. Synefra says the installed load came down from 6.5 MVA to 4 MVA.

On water, GRIHA reports a 65% cut in building use through low-flow fixtures, 55% recycled and reused on campus, and 50% less for landscape, all against its own benchmark.

Suzlon One Earth green building: LEED, GRIHA and the energy figures

The ratings are well documented. Synefra's release of 29 April 2010 says the Indian Green Building Council, which ran LEED in India under licence from the US Green Building Council, rated the campus Platinum with 57 points out of 58 applied for, and that India's ambassador to the United States, Meera Shankar, handed over the citation in Washington DC on 28 April 2010. Suzlon's own release puts the ceremony on Thursday 29 April. CCBA's text from December 2009, written before the rating, gives "56/57". GRIHA's official listing shows a final rating of five stars. For how these systems differ, read our guide to IGBC, GRIHA, LEED and ECSBC.

The energy numbers are less tidy. Four published figures for energy per square metre exist, and they differ:

Two bar charts. Panel 1, reported energy performance index in kWh per sq m per year: 33.2 from the GRIHA audit figure, 55.86 GRIHA headline, 70 from IGBC data analysed by CSE in 2014, and 79.3 from bigEE's 2011 actual use including diesel and solar; against BEE's five-star line of 100 and one-star cut-off of 200 for a warm and humid, mostly air-conditioned office. Panel 2, share of energy made on site: claims of 8 per cent and 5 per cent in outline, against 2.3 per cent from measured solar in 2011; a note says Suzlon called the campus 100 per cent renewable counting off-site wind farms, and that the on-site figures do not add up — Every published figure sits well inside BEE's benchmark, but the four EPI numbers differ, and the measured on-site share is far below the claims. Diagram: MOA

GRIHA sheet: an energy performance index (EPI) of 55.86 kWh per sq m per year, 47% below GRIHA's benchmark; its audit box gives a "final EPI" of 33.2, without explaining the difference.
IGBC data, analysed by CSE: CSE's 2014 paper Making sense of green building rating lists 4,955,941 kWh a year, an EPI of 70. CSE notes the data was self-reported, not audited.
bigEE, 2011 actuals: 5,296,800 kWh from the grid, 197,754 kWh from diesel and 127,299 kWh from solar, 5,621,853 kWh in all, or 79.33 kWh per sq m.

Whichever figure you take, the campus sits below the Bureau of Energy Efficiency's five-star line of 100 for a mostly air-conditioned day-use office in that climate band, and far below the one-star cut-off of 200, as CSE applied them.

On-site renewables are the weak point. The architects claim 8% of annual energy from 154 kW of solar and wind on site; CCBA's 2009 text says 5%. Suzlon's 2010 release calls the campus 100% renewable, and the architects call it zero energy because the rest comes from Suzlon's own wind farms. The measured picture is smaller. bigEE's 2011 solar output of 127,299 kWh is about 2.3% of total use (our arithmetic), and bigEE says the small wind turbines were not working when it compiled its data. GRIHA lists 154.83 kW installed, but its own parts, 13.44 kW of solar and 18 turbines of 4.75 kW, add up to about 99 kW. And 127,299 kWh from 13.44 kW of panels would be roughly six times the 1,200 to 1,500 kWh per kW a year that the NDMC rooftop solar FAQ expects. We report the figures as published and flag that they do not reconcile.

Reception, awards and the 2024 sale

Synefra's release headline called it the largest corporate campus in India to achieve LEED Platinum, and Construction World (January 2012) reported that it won the MIPIM Asia 2011 Gold award for best green building, presented in Hong Kong. CSE's 2014 analysis, which was critical of green ratings in general, found that two of nine rated corporate offices did not qualify for a BEE star label; Suzlon One Earth was not one of them.

Most of what is published comes from the architects, the developer and Suzlon; we found no independent post-occupancy study and no named critic's review we could open. Cost claims also vary: an extra cost of about 11% in the architects' text, about 2.5% overall, recovered in two to three years, in bigEE.

Ownership changed in 2024. Business Today reported on 4 September 2024 that Suzlon was selling the One Earth property for Rs 440 crore to OE Business Park Pvt Ltd, a vehicle held by funds managed by 360 ONE Alternate Asset Management, and would lease it back for up to five years. Suzlon's contact page still lists One Earth as its global headquarters.

What designers in India can take from it

Our reading, for studio projects and real offices:

Fix the cores, leave the floors open. With a brief that changed weekly, the architects fixed only cores, stairs and shafts and left the offices as shells on an 8.4 m module. On any office with an uncertain tenant, decide early what will never move.
Shade before you specify glass. Louvres on every upper-floor window and deep overhangs do the first job; the double glazing with a solar heat gain coefficient of 0.35 does the second. Get the order right: shading first, then glass.
Keep floor plates thin if you promise daylight. The "land scraper" is a shallow plan spread over a large site. Most city offices lack the land, but the depth rule applies to any block.
Ask for metered data, and check that it adds up. This building does well on every published figure, yet the figures conflict, and the on-site renewable claims shrink once measured. Cite meter readings with their year.

Visiting Suzlon One Earth

One Earth is a working corporate office. Suzlon's contact page gives the address and says nothing about visits or tours, and we found no public visiting programme. Students who need access should write to Suzlon and to CCBA well ahead, and should not photograph inside without permission.

FAQ

Who designed Suzlon One Earth?

Christopher Charles Benninger and his Pune practice, CCBA (credited as CCBA Designs). Synefra Engineering & Construction conceived and managed the project, Environmental Design Solutions were the green building consultants, and Vascon Engineers were the prime contractor.

Where is Suzlon One Earth located?

In Hadapsar, Pune, Maharashtra. Suzlon gives the address as One Earth, Hadapsar, Pune 411028.

When was Suzlon One Earth built?

Design began in 2005 according to CCBA's 2009 project text, or 2006 according to its current site, and the campus was completed in October 2009. It received its LEED Platinum citation in April 2010.

What is the area of Suzlon One Earth?

GRIHA gives a site of 45,392 sq m (about 10.4 acres in the architects' figures) and a built-up area of 70,865 sq m, of which 40,418 sq m is air-conditioned. Other sources give 762,785 sq ft, 816,171 sq ft or "a million" sq ft built up.

Is Suzlon One Earth LEED certified, and is there a case study PDF?

Yes: LEED Platinum, rated by the Indian Green Building Council in 2010, and GRIHA five stars. GRIHA publishes a one-page case-study PDF with areas, energy and water figures and the design team.

Planning an office that has to stay cool on less power? Find an architect on MOA.

Sources

CCBA: Suzlon One Earth project page (accessed 11 Nov 2026)
ArchDaily: Suzlon One Earth Global Corporate Headquarters / CCBA Design, 14 January 2014, text and drawings by the architects, photographs by A. Ramprasad Naidu (accessed 11 Nov 2026)
WorldArchitecture: Suzlon One Earth, project text by CCBA Designs, posted December 2009 (accessed 11 Nov 2026)
MGS Architecture: Suzlon One Earth, Pune, the architects' description (accessed 11 Nov 2026)
GRIHA Council: Suzlon - One Earth case-study sheet, final rating, May 2013, and rated projects listing (accessed 11 Nov 2026)
bigEE, Wuppertal Institute: Suzlon One Earth campus, building example with 2011 energy data (accessed 11 Nov 2026)
Centre for Science and Environment: Making sense of green building rating, 2014 (accessed 11 Nov 2026)
Synefra Engineering & Construction, via Newswire: Synefra's project One Earth honored at Washington DC for LEED Platinum, 29 April 2010 (accessed 11 Nov 2026)
Suzlon, via CSRwire: Suzlon global headquarters One Earth receives LEED Platinum certification, 30 April 2010 (accessed 11 Nov 2026)
Construction World: Suzlon One Earth bags yet another award, January 2012 (accessed 11 Nov 2026)
Business Today, Prashun Talukdar: Suzlon Energy sells corporate office One Earth property for Rs 440 crore, 4 September 2024 (accessed 11 Nov 2026)
Suzlon Energy: Contact us (accessed 11 Nov 2026)
Wallpaper, Aastha D: Remembering Christopher Charles Benninger (1942-2024), 10 October 2024 (accessed 11 Nov 2026)
New Delhi Municipal Council: Rooftop solar FAQs (accessed 11 Nov 2026)