Thurulie Garment Factory

Industrial Architecture · MAS Fabric Park, Thulhiriya, Sri Lanka

The brief

The Thurulie garment factory sits inside MAS Fabric Park at Thulhiriya, on a piece of land we did not want to disturb. From the first conversation with MAS the instruction was simple. Touch the ground lightly.

Thurulie was built under Marks & Spencer’s Plan A eco-initiative, as the world’s first purpose-built green factory for apparel.

Reception lounge at Thurulie, with timber and cane furniture against an eco-brick wall and a planted courtyard beyond

Project overview

Location: MAS Fabric Park, Thulhiriya, Sri Lanka
Type: Industrial Architecture
Completed: 2008
Architect: Design Republic
Client: MAS Holdings
Services: Architecture, Industrial Design

Thurulie seen through the trees across the water, its long low roofs above the planting

Covered walkway running the length of a building beside the trees

Steel stair rising through the planting, in black and white

Reception with a curved desk, eco-brick walls and a lounge opening to the garden

The site

Over forty per cent of the building is lifted on stilts. The contours, water flows, and existing trees stayed where we found them.

Eco-brick entrance hall framing a timber window

Entrance verandah with the Thurulie MAS Intimates sign, eco-brick walls and planting

Covered entrance path beside eco-brick walls, under a shade screen

Covered bridge between buildings, open to the greenery on both sides

Design response

Inside, the plan is organised around courtyards, the way an old Sri Lankan house would be. Daylight reaches deep into the production floor. The dining hall looks over a constructed water body that cools the breeze before it enters. A few staircases lead, almost playfully, down to the water.

Concrete stairs among the trees, in black and white

Long covered walkway with steel railings along the treetops

Boardroom with a long timber table and black leather chairs

Office with open desks and glass partitions inside eco-brick walls

Climate response

Roof eaves run long enough to keep the monsoon out, and the building orientation does most of the daylight and ventilation work without help. We collect the rain. The roof gardens cool the hot zones.

The key innovation is evaporative cooling, adapted to a hot, humid climate, which keeps the building comfortable on very little energy. No LEED Platinum building in the tropics had been cooled this way before, so the Thurulie technical team devised a new method to evaluate it, now a basis for the U.S. Green Building Council to assess similar buildings.

Planted courtyard beneath the raised buildings

Open ground floor with a concrete stair beside a planted courtyard

Trees growing up through the courtyard between the raised buildings

The factory’s long buildings along the water, from a grassy bank

Materials

The walls are eco-bricks made from site soil mixed with a little cement. The structure is a hybrid of steel and concrete, sized just enough to do its job.

Two-storey block with a deep overhanging roof and an exposed steel frame, beyond young trees

Terracotta-coloured block and long factory roofs, with coconut palms behind

Workspace open to the trees, with traditional painted figures on the wall

The constructed water body and planted banks beside a terracotta-coloured building

Outcome

Thurulie uses 40% less energy and 50% less water than a comparable factory, and solar panels on its roof generate 10% of the electricity it uses. Its carbon footprint was assessed at 9 tonnes a year, probably one of the lowest in the world.

When it opened, Thurulie became the first new-built factory in the world to earn LEED Platinum, one of fewer than 150 buildings anywhere then rated Platinum for new construction. The U.S. Green Building Council awarded 16 of 17 points for energy, every point for thermal comfort, 5 of 5 for water efficiency, 13 of 14 for site sustainability and 4 of 4 for innovation. In 2009 the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction named it a global best practice and published a book on how it was done.

The certification was welcome. What mattered more was that the workers, several thousand of them, walked into a building that felt like a place rather than a shed. A factory can be more than a place of work. This one was our chance to prove it.

A tall tree and a small tiled-roof pavilion in the grounds

Courtyard of young trees seen through a glazed wall, with stairs and walkways beyond

Timber and cane lounge chairs on a covered terrace above the trees

A man working on a laptop in a lounge open to the trees

Next project

Bernard Botejue Kolonna