Wit-ness to Mat-haroo (??-????) Spirit

I have known G (Gurjit Singh Matharoo) since the days I was a student, and him, my teacher, who gave one-liners or sometimes just one-word lessons at the School of Architecture1. One day, he was on the public phone at the School, maybe a distress call from a client, and as I was jaywalking past him, he pulled me over and asked to join him. As destiny would have it, I ended up as a proud intern in his three-person studio.

Those were his struggling days, and with the practice gathering pace, a magazine approached him for an article on his work. He, instead, asked me to write something hurriedly. Just to avoid my discomfort with academic jargon, I said I would write about wit in his work, to which I was a key witness.

Vagish Naganur is a graduate in Architecture and a post graduate in Landscape Design from CEPT, Ahmedabad. He moved from the dry city to Bangalore, the city of not just gardens. With his fondness for wilderness and his desire for emptiness, his interests branched out further by intertwining with many a firm as their Consultant, and as Design Faculty with few Schools of Architecture. He loves treading the informal path, unravelling hidden stories along its trail, and now with this budding foray into storytelling, is trying to live up to his name fame ‘Vagish - the God of speech.’

Gurjit Singh Matharoo was conferred an International Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2012 - only the third Indian, after architects B.V.Doshi and Charles Correa, to receive this honour. The studio, Matharoo Associates, has gained International and Domestic acclaim for their innovative work, and are Winners of the 2011 Chicago Athenaeum Architectural Award, the 2010 AR House Award and the 2009 Emerging Architecture Award, to name a few. Gurjit enjoys teaching, and was visiting faculty from 1991-2016 and the Chair of Architectural Design from 2016-2019 at his alma mater CEPT, Ahmedabad. He is deeply passionate about all things mechanical, and is often seen riding his naked Ducati to work.