AHMEDABAD: The ambitious Rs 550 crore project,
Leela Palace hotel in Gandhinagar which will also incorporate a railway station, is beginning to take shape and is poised to be ready by December. Sources in the state government say the plan is to ready the 300-room hotel to host Pravasi Bhartiya Diwas (PBD) celebration followed by the Vibrant
Gujarat business summit in January 2019. High-level meetings were held at the state secretariat and with the chief minister on the progress of the project on Thursday. The design of the building has changed since it was unveiled earlier.
With the short deadline, the SPV for the project Gandhinagar Railway and Development Corporation Ltd (GARUD) has allowed the use of innovative construction technology where each floor or slab of the building will be constructed in a four or five-day cycle.
Dikshu Kukreja of CP Kukreja Architects, explained how each room in the five-star hotel will be almost 40 sq metres in size, while in conventional hotels it is 32 sq metres. Other facilities include a club house, a swimming pool, a banquet hall for state functions and a convention centre.
“With limited time, a major challenge was completing the toilets as they can stretch deadlines. To overcome this problem, we used prefabricated, pre-engineered materials to construct bathroom pods and fit a complete entire bathroom on to the building like a Lego block,” said Kukreja.
He added that building has been constructed with
Mahatma Mandir as its focus with the axial design of Gandhinagar city in mind. The building is an abstract flower with three petals joining each other as one tower. Kukreja says his firm referred to railway stations in Hamburg, Berlin, Paris and London as they embodied the character of these cities and were great public spaces. “The building symbolises the rich heritage of the state and is emblematic of modern Gujarat,” said Kukreja.
Hotel-cum-station in Gandhinagar
