As urban designers, our ultimate goal is to promote and create great livable cities. Our urban design practice revolves around deep concerns for context, culture, behavior, potential and actual use, the environment and budgets. We evaluate projects from these different perspectives before developing strategies for new towns and cities, city districts and also for revitalizing existing areas within cities.
We work at different scales. At the overall city scale, our design interventions strive to develop meaningful relationships between the city and its natural environment, natural resource base, heritage, other sensitive areas, climate, citizens and their perceptions of the city, and movement systems shared by different modes of traffic including pedestrians and cyclists. We create cities that have all land uses well integrated with an efficient public transportation system.
At the scale of the district and precincts we create great places for living, work and play that are accessible to all with great spatial character. At the scale of individual public places such as parks and plazas, we create spaces that have multiple behavior settings, and multiple activity nodes to be claimed by different user groups marked by age, gender, social class and race to share and claim the city as their own.
We write Design Guidelines for new developments as well as for rejuvenating old ones. These guidelines help different architects responsible for designing individual buildings and spaces to cooperate towards creation of a spatially defined cohesive public realm.
KCA offers consultancy on a wide range of architectural projects ranging from residential, commercial, institutional, housing, hospitality, heritage and mixed use. Not a believer in ‘labels’, however if we have to put a name on our style, we would like to call it critical regionalist or context driven. Which means the context of the site, the cultural setting; tastes and aspirations of the client shape our work as much as locally available materials and skill bases. KCA’s work for each client is highly customized, instead of repeating a set style or material approach.
In following this principle of building with nature, culture, knowledge and budgets, the aesthetics of our work range from being modern contemporary to being deeply rooted in local materials and crafts
KCA has been involved in conceptualizing and converting several heritage properties into hotels in Rajasthan, India. These palace hotels redefine tradition for the modern global clientele in a manner that not only restores and preserves the character of the buildings but also enhances the potential of the property for both the owner and the user. We pay particular attention to the site and its affordances for designing with nature, creating places that promote restorative experiences away from the bustle of city life.