Avakaz Architects

Our office is over in Forest Park, specifically in the Ratna Castle building on the first floor. If you know the area, it’s a pretty quiet neighborhood compared to the rest of Bhubaneshwar. We spend most of our hours at Avakaz Architects drawing up plans and talking about different building sites. It’s not just about making things look good on paper; there’s a lot of boring technical stuff we have to deal with too. We handle a lot of paperwork and local regulations which can be a real pain sometimes. The office at Flat 103 is usually full of rolled-up charts and half-empty coffee mugs. We’ve been here long enough that the local tea stall guy knows our order by heart. Designing a house or a commercial space takes a lot of back and forth with clients. We try to listen more than we talk, even if we have our own ideas about how a wall should sit or where a window goes. Sometimes we disagree on a layout inside the team, but we eventually figure it out. It’s a small group, so everyone does a bit of everything around the office. We don’t have a big corporate structure or anything like that. It’s just people who happen to be good at architecture trying to make a living in Odisha. The traffic on Ratna Castle Road can get a bit much in the evenings, but we like being centrally located.