UA Lab designs a shared residential park as a concrete pavilion in Ahmedabad

Lea Shell, designed by Gujarat-based UA Lab is a shared community space, interspersed within a site consisting of three building blocks. Set in an urban context that progressively showcases skewed ratios between built and open spaces, the 31,792 sqft residential park provides a range of recreational, landscape and socialising open spaces, with a shrewd combination of refrained interventions and calculated spatial organisations.

The project in India's western city of Ahmedabad grows around three building blocks organised as a right-angled triangle—sneaking its way into the nooks on site; spilling out on vacant open spaces and flaunting an architecture distinct from its context. Christened the central “pavilion” by Indian architects Vipuja Parmar and Krishnakant Parmar of UA Lab, it is the solitary instance of the act of building, restricted to a space between two blocks, overlooking the street beyond the central lawn. The structure, raised on pilotis houses a clubhouse on the ground floor and a gym on the piano nobile, while the roof accommodates a deck.

The open ground floor plan, defined by a grid of circular columns, expands to face open greens, enabling the users to engage with nature. On the street-facing elevation, an external staircase hugs the concrete wall in stark contrast. Glass curtain walls form the edges of the rectangular volume, which accommodates the gym, allowing plenty of natural light into the interiors.

A flat slab breaks the volume of the pavilion, however, failing to vividly distinguish between the mass of the glass-walled first floor and the gridiron void on the ground floor. The pavilion is in fact, antithetical to its type—enduring in materiality, rigid in programme, and confined in mass.

The incongruity between the description of the pavilion and the resultant manifestation in form is evident most plainly in the narrative built around the project. Although described as “a single concrete shell with varied volumes of interconnected spaces,” the skeleton that constitutes flat slabs and concrete columns evokes an image so far from the one intended that one is left searching for a shell that was promised but never delivered.

Architecture is restricted to the centrally placed pavilion and is the only enclosed space designed by the architects in the otherwise landscape-oriented project. The landscape envelops itself around the built form, weaving its way into the crevices between the existing blocks and the new pavilion. A variety of evergreen trees are scattered across the site, creating its own micro-ecosystem. Lawns, decks, a swimming pool, and flower gardens are furnished with shaded seating, designed to accommodate intimate social spaces for smaller groups of people, ventilated by adjacent pathways, walking trails, and open spaces.

On the ground floor, in the stilt area of the existing building blocks, a coffee lounge, library, banquet hall, indoor games room, accommodation for drivers, and administrative areas are nestled in the underside of the building, accommodating shared recreational spaces. A kitchen balcony wraps itself around the children’s play zone, creating safe zones with adult supervision.

Across the site, the material palette is under-toned with natural finishes like wood, stone, and exposed concrete. The resultant colour palette is a collage of earthy tones of browns, greens and greys. The robust disposition of the pavilion enables the project to seamlessly merge within its context.

Lea Shell provides a residential park in an urban context, rejuvenating the scope for community interactions. The concrete pilotis, flat slabs, roof garden, and free ground floor—ubiquitous in the city, appear as both an ode to generations of faculties at the architects’ alma mater (who proliferate as well as practice this Corbusian Brutalist aesthetic), and an audacious imitation of the original.