Method in the

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Madness

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Text: Ishita U. Shah and Gurjit Singh Matharoo

Photos courtesy: Matharoo Associates

Maverick designer Gurjit Singh Matharoo is

an alumnus of School of Architecture, CEPT University,
and the principal designer at Matharoo Associates,
an award-winning design practice. Passionate about
exploring and innovating using design as his prime tool,
the Ahmedabad-based architect takes a walk down
memory lane, and shares his experiences and views.

With soaring levels of

accessibility and exposure,
we are at par with
other countries.
In whatever we do,
our aspirations
must not be local but global.

So I guess designing buildings has

been in my blood. When I decided
that it would be architecture for

me, I came to Ahmedabad to study.

I owe all I am to the fantastic school
founded by Prof. B. V. Doshi. As a
student, it was a place for acute
inquiry. We had some great teachers,
many memorable moments that we
feel nostalgic about, and made some
friends for life, Matharoo says.
For the architect, Master Architect
Mies Van Der Rohe has been his
greatest inspiration. His visit to
Mies Pavilion in Barcelona was
a pilgrimage of sorts. Every day,
he would go and sit inside this
overwhelming exposed and endlessly
enclosed pavilion. Each time the four
walls, eight columns, single roof and

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It has been exactly 100 years, in

1912, that Gurjit Singh Matharoos
great-grandfather left for his
heavenly abode. In his hey days,
when architecture was unheard
of, he served the British, designing
many colonial and palatial buildings
across the deserts of Rajasthan.
Two generations down, engineering
as a career option picked up pace
and the contribution of Matharoos
father as a structural designer can
be seen in the integrated solutions
their firm provides.

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Island in the Sky: Housing Project in Lonavala for Mr. Ajay Devgan

two waters combined, they created

an ever-changing experience of the
pavilion for him as a beholder.
The polished stone reflects the
glass, which itself is transparent so
as to look onto the other stone walls
or the water. The water, too, reflects
every element in the composition
and amid these reflections are
ones own reflections, creating
overlapping dimensions of space and
psyche. I felt that I could die here,
and both the world and I would seem
at peace, Matharoo reveals.
For Mies most profound statements
God is in the details and Less
is more, and moreover for his
accomplishment in being the only
male member of an All Womens Club
in Chicago, Ar. Matharoo chooses to
earnestly bow down to him.

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His practice, Matharoo Associates,

is a fifth floor office overlooking
a garden and the Sabarmati
River. He began by taking part in
competitions to get projects, and
today the architectural firm is highly
acclaimed around the world. Their
internal working philosophy of
when in doubt, reduce; when not
in doubt, surely reduce ensures
clients save a bundle on account
of innovative solutions. The firm
has won a lot many accolades over
the years, including International
Fellowship, Royal Institute of British
Architects (2012), 1 of 7 Most
Promising Architects in the World
(2011), Best International House

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Operating system of windows with ever-changing

domains of soft and hard landscape makes
Virtual, a reality NASSCOM Headquarters, Noida

On the practices design strategy,

the architect says, Like the first
serve in tennis, we give each idea
our best shot more often than not,
its an ace. As a follow-through, we
are able to satisfy even the smallest
of clients functional requirements.
Our projects are injected with a
potent dose of wit, so buildings
are not sterile, but fun to be in
and playful. Innovation becomes an
essential ingredient of our soulful
cuisines.
They use materials in their natural
form. The harsh sun falling on
wood, concrete, brick, stone or
metal creates profound textures,
much like carvings do to a temple
in tropical light. Their buildings are
rooted in nature.

Matharoo defines his outlook towards

sustainability as a turquoise
approach to architecture taking
green and adding a little blue for
open-mindedness, so environmentalism goes hand in hand with science.
Design may be a meticulous
process, but it doesnt have to be
mundane. He believes in being
highly systematic yet childlike when
it comes to the design process. The
clients brief and site requirements
are listed down, after which a
quick internal competition is held.
The entire team comes up with
concepts, and an idea or more are
chosen through secret ballot so that
theres no bias.
I also win sometimes! he says.
Valuable points from other concepts
are then added and these ideas are

beautifully rendered in water colours

by in-house artists-cum-architects
to bring out the essential feel of
the place conceived. This mix of
intuitive thoughts and the rationale
is then presented to the clients.
In the process, the team looks for
peculiarities in the clients brief
and context that could give their
creations an individual character, in
a direction yet less explored. That is
how every building design turns out
to be a one-off customised solution
unique to the clients requirements.

gurjit singh matharoo

Award (2010) and Top Emerging

Architect Worldwide (2009).

indian insight

We like to call ourselves romantics

people governed by emotion over
calculation, and affected by beauty
more than gain. Maybe that is why we
have been described as eccentric,
mavericks or plain gando (mad), he
says, adding, Our approach is to do
first and think later. Not to say that
our off-the-mark trajectories are

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SWA journey home to the nature within. A township at Ahmedabad

43

not followed up by solid reason and

research.
As a team, the practice sees
architecture as art that we dwell
within, and without. Buildings
serve as a catalyst; a catalyst is a
compound that expedites a reaction
while remaining untouched in
the process; in the man-nature
relationship, nature both within
us and outside of us. The belief is
that there is an inner urge to make
buildings that elate one from a
normal level of existence to a higher
being. So the team looks forward to
discovering buildings with a high
emotive content, unfolding around
ones body as one moves through
them, revealing their utmost secrets
and deep meanings, over time and
over spatial layers.
Ar. Matharoo feels that the economic
surge has created a lot of potential
for architects today. However,
sensible architecture comes in
after the first and immediate rush,
like a starving man at a buffet, to
do anything that has now become
possible. Hes concerned that
before this sensibility awakens, we
would have already destroyed many
cities, and cities are there for a long
time to come.

House with the Warped Court Residence in Surat

Architects were called master

builders; today we have made
builders our masters. When someone
excels in planning national policies,
devising intricate software networks
or formulating complex drugs, they
are termed architects of their
respective fields whereas we have

ourselves devalued our discipline

to the point of embarrassment. The
Constitution of India terms us as
visionaries, architecture is called
the noblest of all professions, but
our own vision has become myopic
and we have long traded nobility
for upward mobility. Only we are to

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Residence in ORDOS 100,

Inner Mongolia, China

44

be blamed. I urge the architecture

fraternity to rise above mediocrity
and let society treat and re-establish
us with the dignity and honour the
profession deserves, he says.
With immense global exposure
behind him, he speaks of pressing

indian insight
gurjit singh matharoo

Net House Weekend House at Ahmedabad

concerns how we can spend less

on buildings, make them sustainable
and use new materials and processes.
Expressing his delight at being chosen
as juror at the World Architecture
Festival, Barcelona (2011), and the
present one in Singapore (2012), he
says he is intrigued to see sensitive
work coming from countries not
labelled First World. The centres
are shifting with meaningful work
happening in Latin America and
South East Asia, he says.

an already complex mechanism

blood flow in Prathama and
ritualistic
incorporations
in
Ashwinikumar Crematorium. Both
these projects won important
national and international awards
and are testimony that his firm met
those life-and-death challenges
successfully. With 1,00,000 bodies
burned and with 25,000 gallons of
blood collected and consumed, we
like to consider them as our most
successful buildings, he says.

events, the giant walls of the

three-storey structure move out to
render the otherwise closed building
entirely open to public. We have
named it Shifting Borders.

Dissecting his own work, he finds

Prathama Blood Centre (Ahmedabad)
and Ashwinikumar Crematorium
(Surat) noteworthy. Both projects,
won
through
competitions,
marked the beginning of Matharoo
Associates foray into institutional
projects; they call them the lifeand-death projects.

On the whole, Matharoo Associates

have dealt with an interesting, mixed
bag of projects. There is a building
which has large remote-controlled
screens in stone with patterns of
fossilised plants in it. This is set
against actual vertical landscape,
similar in character and scale.
Together, they create an illusion
of what is real, what is reflected
and what is a reflection of reality.
Timeless and transitory, this project
is termed Moving Landscapes.

Glowing in the soft evening light

of Ahmedabad and nestled on a
large green expanse, one can see
a pinpoint of altering light. As one
travels towards it through a fissure in
the landscape, the source gradually
reveals itself. This is the building we
call Light Osmosis.

In another institutional building,

which hosts occasional public

Come October, the firm is excited

about moving into a new studio,
presently under construction. The
basement will have a mechanical
workshop for our nefarious underground activities. The entire studio
faces a garden on one side and

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The blood centre was to be a lounge

for donors, and not a medical
facility building. The crematorium
was to be constructed at a site
where cremations could not be
stopped an added challenge to

In a subterranean house fully buried

under a green landscape, there is a
10-lakh-litre rain water tank with
a swimming pool above it, literally
creating ripples with layers of water
below earth. This ones called
Undercurrent House.

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a swimming pool on the other, a

hangover from the present riverside
office. The name is obvious
The Pool.
Highly innovative and exciting archihtecture is not all. Ar. Matharoos
passion for auto-mobiles and
mechanics offers a rich pursuit for
understanding design through his
eyes. When I was growing up in
Ajmer, my fathers BSA500 Twin was
the pride of the place! My brother
and I watched him dismantle and put
it back together numerous times,
accompanying him, cleaning, passing
him the tools and generally hanging
around. Observing him led to an
interest in machines and I am able to
pursue it as a hobby today. he says.
An interest in academics is another
side of this multifaceted architect;
it connects him strongly with the
fraternity and the city. He says that
by teaching he is able to partly
pay back what he owes the school
for what it has made him today.
Whenever the administration invites
him to teach, he is thrilled. He
believes in bringing new ideas on

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Floating Landscapes
Diamond Factory, Surat

46

board. Students are not allowed

to leave the two-and-a-half-hourlong class. They are supposed to
only produce work, self-correct and
produce more an unselfconscious
approach to design unburdened by
the load of information and undue
supervision; do first, think later.
Prof. Doshi, whom he reveres, on
seeing the outcome of this approach
in students work, compared this to
life in a gurukul.
Like in his practice, he follows a
hands-on approach with students.
For one design studio exercise, to
get students started, they were
asked to cast their alternative
designs in chocolate. The chosen
one would be preserved, the
rest could be gobbled up. Being
miniature and precious, students
skillfully crafted alternate designs,
merrily eliminating unwanted ones.

Matharoo is all for integrating

design work, bringing together
architecture, interiors, landscape
and structure under one roof.
We are very fortunate that the
major changes happened during
our formative years when India
abandoned the socialist shroud
and opened economy, change from
manual to a computerised society,
one channel to multichannel, the
cell phone, highways, metros and
airports rapidly developed during our
youth. I cannot recollect another two
decades where so much happened.
All this has given Gen Next a lot
to do and less time to think. My
message to them would be, with
these soaring levels of accessibility
and exposure, we too are same as
other countries and so, in whatever
we do, our aspirations must not be
local but global, he ends. i