Gurjit Singh Matharoo
One of our reasons for choosing the title FREESPACE for the 16th International Architecture Exhibition was because it includes the term ’space’. We see architects as primarily space-makers, be it at the scale of the city, the landscape or the profile of the facade.
The work of Matharoo Associates is represented here by a project which concerns itself with the making of FREESPACE within a tight urban plot using economical means. The architects talk about liberating structure from its load-bearing role, using it rather as a space-making element, forming a series of interlocking planes, bent and folded into each other. The effort is to eliminate perceived boundaries and to allow small spaces to be perceived as being bigger than they really are. This project is important to FREESPACE because of its focus on structure, one of the basic elements of architecture, and also because it imbues and overlays a sense of play and delight on what might otherwise be conceived as a mute and silent component. We see this quality in much of the work of Matharoo Associates which is both serious and playful such as the House with Balls, or the Moving Landscapes House. Perhaps this is a product of how they describe their aspiration for architecture and structure to be “liberated from this theoretical burden”.
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