With over 15 years of experience across building materials, product development, and design specifications, Ankur Jain, founder and CEO of the soon-to-launch Knowledge Center (KC) in Gurugram, has spent his career working closely with other architects, contractors, designers, students, and vendors. And in his words, the industry’s biggest issues haven’t evolved. “Everyone is busy, but everyone is working in silos. Architects are still chasing samples. Brands are dispatching their teams from site to site, just trying to catch a moment with the decision-makers. Students graduate without ever seeing how a tender works. Contractors are explaining finishes over phone calls. It’s chaos; just moving at a slow, inefficient pace,” he says.
Indeed, India’s architecture and construction sector is witnessing rapid expansion, but it continues to suffer from deeply embedded inefficiencies. Architects lose critical hours coordinating across scattered vendor networks. Designers are forced to chase samples from multiple showrooms just to freeze one finish. Contractors often face delays due to miscommunication or delayed approvals.
Young professionals often struggle to gain exposure to real-world projects or industry tools. Brands, despite having strong portfolios, frequently fail to reach active specifiers at the right moment. Even something as basic as finalising a lighting layout or material combination can take weeks due to fragmented workflows.
Spread across 100,000 sq. ft., it’s a fully integrated, physical hub designed to bring material discovery, project simulation, studio infrastructure, vendor access, and content creation under one roof. “This is not a co-working space. It’s not a showroom. It’s not a library. It’s the one place where every stakeholder in a construction project can walk in and move things forward—without chasing, guessing, or waiting,” say Jain.
Built on a tiered membership model, KC offers different access plans for students, freelancers, contractors, design firms, and brands. Students can attend workshops, portfolio sessions, and walkthroughs. Studios can work from project bays, use rendering labs, conduct client meetings, and access real-time material zones. Vendors can display their products in curated pods and engage directly with specifiers without relying solely on digital catalogues or distributor networks.
“We don’t take commissions. We don’t interfere in how you price. But we give you visibility where it actually matters—inside the design process,” Ankur adds.
The facilities include India’s first Walk Your Plan projection room, where layouts can be displayed at scale for immediate feedback. A live Material Library replaces scattered samples and outdated PDFs with tactile, ready-to-use SKUs (Stock Keeping Unit). Professionals can also use content studios, podcast bays, and editing suites to record walkthroughs, team updates, or educational explainers.
Ankur adds, “Why shouldn’t an architect record a how-to video on waterproofing and share it with juniors? Why should a tile brand wait six weeks for an agency edit when we’ve built that capacity in-house?”
KC also features multi-purpose seminar halls, a members-only café, breakout zones, and a dedicated crèche. “We’ve had women tell us they’d attend industry sessions more regularly if they had a safe space for their children. Now they do,” Ankur notes.
Ultimately, KC is built to solve problems across levels—from students struggling to get live exposure to brands trying to get Facetime with decision-makers to architects managing teams across four different WhatsApp groups.
KC is set to open its doors soon and is already planning its next rollouts in Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad. Ankur signs off by saying, “This isn’t about predicting the future. It’s about building what the present should have delivered by now. We’re not here to disrupt—we’re here to organize. This platform was born out of lived experience and frustration. I’ve seen how much time, energy, and potential gets lost every day, and KC is our way of fixing that.
