The new headquarters of Hajee Air Travels in New Paltan, Dhaka, designed by KAAY with architects Tansen Alam Sangit and Rafia Rukhsat, spans 3,688 square feet and reimagines the corporate office as a journey rather than a static workplace. The design focuses on the motion of people, ideas, and journeys, asking how an aviation agency can translate the experience of flight into everyday work life.
The ceiling is treated as a canvas: exposed wiring, ducts, and HVAC systems are painted in bold cerulean, turning industrial necessity into an honest, expressive feature. Above workstations, white, cloud-like curvilinear panels float, softening the technical elements and guiding movement. This design gives the office a sense of height, openness, and possibility, making the ceiling feel like a sky.
Capsule-shaped workstations replace traditional desks, eliminating sharp corners and promoting fluid movement. Their forms echo aircraft cabins and fuselages, reinforcing the project's aerodynamic geometry. At the 'nose' of each workstation, integrated planters with snake plants offer biophilic relief, providing green moments amid long hours of ticketing, coordination, and client interaction.
Transparency is a core value, with frameless glass partitions defining offices and meeting rooms, detailed with geometric silk-screen patterns that balance openness and discretion. Sightlines remain uninterrupted, allowing employees to share a visual relationship with the skyline, symbolizing trust and connectivity in a business built on logistics.
The architects liken the office to moving through an airport from terminal to cabin, where each zone prepares you for the next. Waiting areas feature modular ottomans in jewel tones, adding pops of color without crowding. Material choices include polished stone and glass for professionalism, vertical timber battens for warmth, and wood shelving and louvres to soften the tech-driven environment.
Lighting shapes mood: recessed LED strips trace the cloud ceilings, black cylindrical pendants provide task lighting, and under-desk LEDs and backlighting in executive areas add depth, echoing first-class cabin elegance. The executive suite, with a monolithic desk facing the skyline, serves as a quiet anchor, merging operational oversight with poetic vision.
Branding is subtle: the deep teal ceiling references sky and sea without literal illustration, and fluid forms suggest motion without mimicry. Even exposed wiring becomes part of the narrative, technical and honest. The design resists excess, allowing function to inform beauty, creating an office that knows exactly where it is going.
Ultimately, Hajee Air Travels' office reflects a contemporary understanding of work in Dhaka: fast-paced, global, yet deeply human. The space responds to long hours and complex operations with light, openness, and calm. Plants offer visual resets, rounded forms ease movement, and views remind occupants that their work connects people to places beyond these walls.
This is not an office that asks employees to sit still; it encourages flow between desks, departments, clients, and consultants, between ground and sky. In translating the fluidity of flight into architectural language, the project achieves a workplace that feels both efficient and expansive, rooted in the city yet always looking outward.
