Chakhava graduated in architecture from Georgian Technical University in 1949 and made his career inside the Soviet Georgian state apparatus, rising to deputy minister of highway construction in the 1970s. That post made him, unusually, both the client and the lead architect of his ministry’s own headquarters in Tbilisi, designed with Zurab Jalaghania and finished in 1975. The building states his central idea, the "Space City" method: hang the accommodation in horizontal two-storey slabs stacked and crossed over a few vertical cores, and let the hillside run on underneath, unbuilt. He used the same logic at the Café Fantasy in Batumi, also 1975, and worked on the Russia–Georgia Friendship Monument in 1983. He received the USSR State Prize that year.
