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The first impression when you to go to India is that everything is more messy, more crowded, more polluted, faster. This is because your plane is probably landing in New Delhi or Mumbai.

Fortunately India doesn't show always this face, we realized this once arrived in Ahmedabad for the Habitat design studio 2014.
Although it's house to more than 6 million people, Ahmedabad has another feeling, another flow, even more in its suburbs such as Gota, our project site for affordable housing.

As a design group we agreed that understanding the local needs was our first aim which could lead to a main design input, so we organized interviews with local people and as a result we realized that the people we are going to design for are really humble: simplicity, everyday nature, flexibility were common keywords.

Together with other top-down decisions, such as to give importance and respect to the already existing urban fabric, to include the redesign and rehabilitation of the (polluted) lake in our housing proposal and to thoroughly study the local climate (monsoon season, day-night temperatures, wind directions) we have been able to set all the elements for our design concept.

Our proposal envisions the architect as designer of a “urban frame” and related basic facilities (water and electricity supply) on which future inhabitants can customize the organization of the spaces of their future houses.
In doing so, the dwellings will have a well-thought and consistent starting point (the ground floor) on which future extension will be safely and respectfully organized by tenants themselves.

On a typology level, every unit can provide a house from 2 to 4 families at the ground floor organized around a courtyard (a vernacular architectural element well exploited in Ahmedabad mainly for climatic purposes) in order to provide a semi-private transitional space where neighbors can share life a bit more intimately.
Units share walls to save on construction material and piping and are shifted in order to create new (commercial or social) spaces on the public streets.

Our project strives for simplicity and clarity both on unit and urban scales, believing that this approach can still preserve the inner complexity of the Indian culture.

In what way does your proposal contribute to the open society?
Indians are not ready for the same architectural booming that hit china in the '90s. Indians want it differently, Indians want to economically grow while preserving their identity and culture.

In this regard, our proposal listens to the future inhabitants and gives them a democratic urban platform where the non-spoken rules, so well-established inside the Indian culture, are still integral part of the design process together with our initial design decisions as architects.