CA challenges traditional conversations of retail, commercial and residential space with a broad vocabulary of materials and fluent translation of space, light, and geometry.
This approach is exemplified in WRAP 3, a computer room that CA designed for primary and secondary students at the JDT Orphanage in Calicut, India. "We wanted as much stimuli as possible to make the end product a living organism. [The work] is about creating living spaces," asserts Ahmed, who earned a degree in Architectural Engineering in 1993 from Regional Engineering College (Calicut, India).
The 1,800-square-foot computer training environment seems lifted from the landscape of Dr. Seuss's Who-ville. Cantilevered workstations "hover" above a ceramic tile floor. On angled walls, windows float like long steams of blown soap bubbles. The walls are made from a framework of structural steel clad with laminates. CA favours this type of steel because it has both "tensile and compressive strength," according to Tharani. The crayon-coloured purple and green acrylic paint on the walls is appropriate for the room's youthful clients. The ceiling, fashioned from gypsum board and steel, is also laminated. Compact fluorescents illuminate individual work areas on the workstations.
"We love to explore," says Tharani, who has a diploma in Interior Architecture from the Sophia Polytechnic. "We want to innovate on every project." The firm's WRAP concept refers to its view of erasure of boundaries between walls, floors and ceilings, as well as its willingness to draw upon different disciplines to interpret clients' briefs.
The CA team incorporates design strategies from interior design, sociology and architecture, as well as Ahmed's and Tharani's respective studio and corporate backgrounds "We don't want to be shaped as a retail or institutional architectural firm," Ahmed stresses. Tharani's dream project would be to design a campus for an educational facility, and Ahmed's would be to design a museum. Begun in 2000, the firm now employs fifteen people and has offices in both Calicut and Mumbai (formerly Bombay). Both cities are located on India's west coast. CA's clients are mostly business entrepreneurs. Tharani describes them as "widely travelled" individuals who are exposed to the latest developments in art and architecture. Ahmed notes that 90 percent of the clients are under the age of 40.

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