ArchitectureLive! An online mecca for Indian architects

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India has more than 50,000 registered architects and about 25,000 of them are active. And of these active architects, about 50% are online. Rajesh Advani, a Delhi based architect knows this and has attempted to develop a platform to bring them all together. Rajesh, who also dabbles into web designing previously started up Construction Guru, an online business that tried to create and manage a database of architects. That startup failed but hardened him and gave him some insights for his current venture, ArchitectureLive! which he has started with co-founder Dwaipayan Chakravarty, a fellow Architect from Pune.

Started in November 2011, ArchitectureLive! is a repository of Indian Architectural Projects. "It has now also become a unique platform for Indian Architects to showcase, share, manage and upload their projects. ArchitectureLive! allows each project to be associated with huge meta data like, climate, topography, materials, metaphors, location and more," informs Rajesh. The main value proposition is that ArchitectureLive! will make every project highly searchable on the Internet, allowing recognition to budding and young architects in India.

Currently ArchitectureLive! has more than 200 projects. "The effort was kick started by approaching the bigger firms and once they were online, we're organically seeing others put up their projects," says Rajesh. Reputed firms like Morphogenesis, Christopher Benninger, Revathi Kamath, Chitra Vishawanath and Lotus Design have listed their projects. ArchitectureLive! features each project uniquely with Google Maps and expandable fields. In coming one year ArchitectureLive plans to add features like jobs, events, schools and products to make it more useful for architects and institutes in India.

Talking about accolades, Rajesh says with a beam, "ArchitectureLive! won it's first award by A3 Foundation, Chandigarh, under Online Journalism category." ArchitectureLive has partnered with and supported various organisations like National Association of Students of Architecture in India, Conferences like Women In Architecture (wiamahacon.com) and Events like Light India 2012. Going forward, the vision is to become the one stop platform for architects in India.

How Architect Works is another startup working in the same field. It shares everything from the Architechture world on its portal!