City's Living Room, Ahmedabad
Collab Living is a future-oriented mixed-use development that seeks to become Ahmedabad’s living room — a shared, porous space that dissolves the rigid boundaries between public and private, commercial and cultural.
Can we flip around the way commercial spaces are perceived?
Interestingly, we were approached for a co-living student accommodation, with commercial space below. This condition of a building without a boundary wall, is ironically among the most inclusive forms in our cities. Unlike gated institutions, commercial buildings spill into the public realm. The project uses this opportunity to question the very idea of “commercial” - stripped it of stigma, reprogrammed it for collectivity.
Imagine you are walking on the main road in a deeply institutionalised context, minutes away from the top universities in Ahmedabad. You sway gently as the road rises to meet the plinth, drawing you inward, into the city’s living room. The area is alive at all hours, students gather on parked bikes, linger, and converse. A cafe where food isn’t fast; it’s a medium of connection, a reason to dwell. Men and women just sitting around, they’re themselves too. The city’s cultural memory holds places like Manek Chowk and the Municipal Market, where the night is as social as the day. Roads themselves adapt fluidly across time, hosting everything from morning fruit stalls to late-night chats. The plaza adapts to this diversity and flux of programmes. We ask ourselves as architects- is it possible to create an atmosphere like this- with the mood and intensity.
The site constraints demanded efficiency, leading to a long, narrow massing. This led, intuitively, to a linear spine, with rooms unfolding into an active living corridor. Rather than dark, single-loaded passageways, the design inserts angular plinths, spaces to pause, to meet, to inhabit. It’s a scaled-up domestic model: you enter through the living room before retreating into your bedroom. The rooms themselves are minimal, contemplative spaces of rest, akin to the monk-like Corbusier model.
To the developers, we proposed a shift.
To a relationship that gives back to the public- and in doing so, becomes the magnet that draws them in.
To reimagine the “commercial” as communal,
To reframe profit as a byproduct of generosity,
To build not just a project, but a memory in the life of the city.
