Square of the Polygon

This is one of the newer office buildings in the city. It came up in the last couple of years and is yet to be fully occupied. The developers however did not worry too much about maintaining any connect with what the real estate was being used for earlier and just went ahead in naming it the 'Polygon'. 

The Polygon, at Teynampet/Nandanam, stands on the site of what was once the 'nursery of Madras'. For about half-a-century, since moving to this site in 1952, P.S. Swaminatha Iyer's Soundarya Nursery was the go-to place for saplings of any kind. If you needed flowering plants for your 'front garden' or fruit trees for your 'back garden', Soundarya would supply them; Swaminatha Iyer was known for walking around with a pen-knife all the time. That way, he was able to mix and match cuttings to produce hybrid varieties of hibiscus and bougainvilla. Soundarya Nursery continued that good work even after Swaminatha Iyer died in 1972. It was only more than a generation later that the property changed hands. The Nursery itself has now grown branches, with one at Vettuvankeni and another in Pudupakkam, run by Swaminatha Iyer's youngest son and a grandson.

In the evenings, the Polygon's colour-changing lighting detail provides a relief to the unblinking bright blue of the nearby Apollo Hospital's signage. That is probably the only connect the developers have retained, channelling the colours of all those flowers in the Nursery into the LED lights on the building's facade!

The first of the month, and it is Theme Day for the City Daily Photo group. Take a look at squares from over the world here!