BENGALURU GPO

The Gen­eral Post Office, can be described as a “mod­ern clas­si­cal” build­ing, located at the inter­sec­tion of Raj Bha­van Road and Ambed­kar Veedhi. The GPO build­ing com­ple­ments the neigh­bour­ing Vid­hana Soudha.

The Gov­ern­ment had taken a deci­sion way back in 1964, to con­struct a 24-storeyed build­ing to replace the old res­i­dency post office build­ing, to meet the increas­ing needs of the postal net­work in Ban­ga­lore. How­ever, to fall in line with the Urban Arts Commission’s instruc­tions, this deci­sion was changed and a seven storeyed build­ing was planned.

The new GPO build­ing has been built on the land where the old Res­i­dency build­ing served for over 117 years, and was pulled down in 1979. Built at a cost of Rs 3.5 crore, it has a plinth area of 1.2 lakh sq ft and can house 1,000 employ­ees. The impos­ing podium of the build­ing has a 40-foot tall gran­ite pil­lar and a sweep­ing set of evenly grained steps. The over­all height of the build­ing is 120 feet. The build­ing is impos­ing in clas­si­cal design. The facade is adorned with fine-tooled, tall gran­ite pil­lars and stone masonry. Nearly 200 hand-picked stone cut­ters, expe­ri­enced in tra­di­tional tem­ple archi­tec­ture, came from the south­ern states to shape the build­ing in 1982. The stones were quar­ried near Dodd­a­bal­la­pur from where 300 loads of stones were brought to be cut and carved in Hoysala tradition.TheGPO was inau­gu­rated by Rajiv Gandhi on Novem­ber 14, 1985.