ABBY Design Grand Prix + 4
Case Study
The Rising
Indiabulls Group
Discipline
Brand Experience · Environmental Design · Art Installation
Client
Indiabulls Group
Scope
Concept · Design · Fabrication · Installation — 14 months
The Brief
Founded in 2000 by three young entrepreneurs, Indiabulls grew in fourteen years into one of India's largest corporate groups — with a net worth exceeding ₹19,320 crores across finance, real estate, securities and power. They needed to distil that phenomenal rise into something their employees and business partners could feel, every single day, walking through their headquarters.
First
India's first corporate brand art installation — a category that did not exist before this project
Award
Design Grand Prix, ABBY One Show 2014 — plus numerous national and international awards
Scale
10,600 suspended cubes · 50ft × 31ft × 16ft · 6.5 tonnes · 14 months to complete
01
We were called in to design wall graphics. We came back and recommended India's first corporate art installation instead.
The original brief was modest: motivational wall graphics for employees, something to convey Indiabulls' values to visiting dignitaries. After reviewing the site, we saw something the brief had missed entirely. The main atrium of the Indiabulls Finance Centre — their iconic headquarters on the Mumbai skyline — was a ten-storey void of extraordinary scale and presence. Posters with clever lines would have been invisible in it. We went back to the client with a different proposition entirely: commission an installation that used the full drama of that space to communicate the scale and drive of the company itself. The client said yes. Fourteen months later, The Rising existed.
The Rising — Indiabulls Art Installation
02
10,600 individually suspended cubes. A winged figure 31 feet tall. The sheer scale of the installation communicates what no headline ever could.
The installation occupies the full volume of the atrium: 50 feet wide, 31 feet high, 16 feet deep. 10,600 cubes, suspended together, weigh 6.5 tonnes in total. At first glance — from across the lobby, from the entrance, from any distance — the arrangement resolves into a single powerful image: a man with wings, arms outstretched, rising. The figure embodies Indiabulls' founding value of 'Never Stop' — the sky-is-the-limit attitude that took three young founders from a financial services startup in 2000 to one of India's largest corporate houses in fourteen years. No copy. No explanation needed. The scale of the thing says everything the brand needed to say.
The Rising — Installation Detail
The Rising — Installation Scale
03
As the viewer walks across the atrium, the changing point of view reveals a second reading — currency symbols, and the memory of where Indiabulls began.
The installation's deeper intelligence lies in what happens as you move through the space. The 10,600 cubes are positioned not just to form the winged figure from the front, but to create a second image from the side: currency symbols, embedded in the same structure, visible only as the viewer's angle shifts. As an employee crosses the atrium — a journey made dozens of times each day — the sculpture changes beneath their gaze. First the aspiration: the man rising, the company's ambition made monumental. Then the origin: the currency symbols, a reminder that this flight began as a financial services company, and that the discipline of that beginning is still present in the structure. The static installation uses the viewer's own movement to tell the brand's complete story.
The Rising — Currency Symbol View
The Rising — Atrium Context
The Rising — Installation Detail
04
The Rising became a destination in itself — covered by international design media, visited by people who came to the building simply to see it.
The measure of a great piece of brand communication is whether it works beyond the audience it was built for. The Rising was conceived for Indiabulls employees and business partners. It became something that ordinary people sought out. Visitors arrived at the Indiabulls Finance Centre not for meetings but to stand in that atrium and look up. International design blogs covered it. The Indian media made it a story. The ABBY One Show jury awarded it the Design Grand Prix in 2014 — the highest honour in Indian advertising. In creating India's first corporate art installation, Hyphen had also created a new category of brand communication: one that used space, scale and the viewer's own movement as its medium.
The Rising — Grand Prix Winning Installation

The brief arrived as a request for wall graphics. The site changed everything. When we walked into the atrium of the Indiabulls Finance Centre — the headquarters of one of India's fastest-growing corporate groups, a building that had become a landmark on the Mumbai skyline — the scale of the space made the original brief feel inadequate. This was a ten-storey void, an architectural statement in its own right. Posters and clever lines would have disappeared inside it. We went back to the client with a recommendation: don't decorate this space. Use it.

The case for India's first corporate art installation rested on a single insight about what Indiabulls needed its communication to do. Founded in 2000 by three young entrepreneurs as a financial services company, the group had grown in just fourteen years into a ₹19,320 crore corporate house with operations spanning finance, real estate, securities and power. That story — the scale of it, the speed of it, the ambition that drove it — was the brand's most powerful asset. The question was how to make employees and visiting business partners feel that story, not just know it. The answer had to be physical. It had to be impossible to ignore.

The design concept that emerged used the full volume of the atrium: 50 feet wide, 31 feet high, 16 feet deep. 10,600 individually positioned cubes, suspended together on a structure weighing 6.5 tonnes, arranged to form a figure of a man with wings. The choice of image was precise: Indiabulls' founding value of 'Never Stop' — the sky-is-the-limit attitude that defines the company's character — expressed not in words but in the most ancient and universal symbol of human aspiration. A figure that rises. The green of Indiabulls, and the universal colour of money, ran through the installation's palette.

The installation's second layer of meaning was designed for the people who move through the space every day. As a viewer crosses the atrium, their changing point of view reveals something embedded in the same 10,600 cubes: currency symbols, visible from the side, invisible from the front. The structure that shows you ambition from one angle shows you origin from another. The rising man gives way to the financial foundations. It is a reminder — built into the architecture of the installation itself — that present accomplishments are only the next step in a longer journey. The static object uses the viewer's movement as a narrative device.

The project took fourteen months to complete from concept to installation. The fabrication and engineering challenges of suspending 6.5 tonnes of precisely positioned cubes in a working corporate atrium were considerable. The result justified every month of that work. The Indiabulls Finance Centre atrium became a destination: employees described stopping in the middle of the lobby just to look at it; visitors who had come for meetings stayed longer than they intended; and people with no connection to Indiabulls began arriving simply to see The Rising for themselves.

International design media covered the installation. Indian newspapers and magazines made it a story in its own right. And at the ABBY One Show 2014, the advertising industry's most prestigious Indian awards, The Rising was awarded the Design Grand Prix — the highest recognition available. It was the first time a corporate art installation had been entered in that category, because it was the first time one had existed. In building The Rising, Hyphen had not just solved a client brief. It had invented a new form of brand communication.

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