II
The Story
A life in three hands.
Architect, founder, custodian. The chapters do not run one after the other. They run at the same time, in the same room: a house his family has held since c. 1840, and inside the orbit of his uncle Yousaf Salahuddin, the maternal grandson of Allama Iqbal.
نہیں ہے ناامید اقبال اپنی کشتِ ویراں سے ۔ ذرا نم ہو تو یہ مٹی بہت زرخیز ہے ساقی
“Iqbal is not without hope for his barren field. Let it have but a little moisture; this soil is very fertile, O cup-bearer.”
London, and the discipline of drawing.
Ali Shah read architecture at the Bartlett School at University College London. A school known less for what it builds than for how it teaches one to look. The training was severe. Section, plan, elevation. The expectation that a drawing should be able to say something a photograph cannot.
He kept that discipline. Years later, every floor plan that crosses his desk at SABCON is read first as a drawing. For proportion, for breath, for the way a person will feel walking through it, before it is read as a return on capital.
"The buildings we are most loyal to are the ones we drew badly and then forgave."
A note from a Bartlett crit
Lahore, and the weight of inheritance.
He returned to Lahore to take a seat at SABCON. The family real-estate house his great-grandfather had been part of building. Inheritance, he learned, is not a gift delivered on a tray. It is a set of obligations that arrive on the same morning as the title.
Under his leadership, SABCON refined its position from a developer of projects into a steward of the city's longer arc. The brief tightened. The horizon extended.
A workspace, and the building of a brother's company.
COLABS was co-founded with his twin brother Omar. First as a single floor in Lahore, then as something the country's founders began to treat as a piece of public infrastructure. The family's real-estate spine became the company's backbone: long leases, intelligent buildings, room to grow without panic.
A US $3M round in 2022 confirmed what the founders had already suspected: that Pakistan's startup ecosystem did not need another accelerator. It needed an address.
Home, and the work of keeping a room alive.
He lives and often works from Haveli Barood Khana, an 18th-century structure in the Chabuk Sawaran neighbourhood of the Walled City, facing the Lahore Fort. The house was built under the Sikh Empire as the city's primary arms depot and was acquired by his ancestor Mian Karim Baksh around 1840. One of the rooms was designed by his great-great-grandfather; the frescoes are restored in patient, quiet seasons.
The Haveli is the constant under the founder, the developer, and the citizen. It is also a working cultural address: the courtyard where his uncle, Yousaf Salahuddin, hosts the Virsa concerts, in the same rooms that once received Iqbal, Jinnah and Faiz.
