Project team: Gurjit Singh Matharoo-Principal Architect, Professor MC Gajjar- Architectural Advisor, Avneesh Tiwari- Project Architect
Structural Design: Rajendra Singh Matharoo, Hitesh Rathi, Matharoo Associates
Interior Design: Matharoo Associates
Landscape Design: Vagish Naganur, Matharoo Associates
Electrical Consultant: Jit Engineering Services Ltd
Plumbing: Bharat K Chauhan
General Contractor: United Constructions
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All About the Architect
Gurjit Singh Matharoo is the principal at Matharoo Associates, a studio that began operations in Ahmedabad, India in 1992.The firm since its inception has been involved in a diverse range of projects that have brought them international as well as domestic recognition, they are the recipients of a variety of distinguished awards such as:
- Conferred International Fellow RIBA 2012, only Indian Architect besides B.V.Doshi and Charles Correa.
- 2011-Chosen one of seven trend breaking architects from around the world by ETH Zurich, Switzerland
- Chicago Athenaeum Architecture Awards 2011- Winner, for Net House, Ahmedabad,
- The AR House award 2010- Winner, for House with balls, Ahmedabad,
- The AR Emerging Architecture Award 2009-Winner, for Curtain door, Shantam Residence, Surat
- The Aga Khan Awards 2009- Nomination, for Ashok Patel Residence, Ahmedabad
- The WAN House of the year award 2006 -Runners up, for Ashok Patel Residence, Ahmedabad.
- The AR Emerging Architecture Award 2005- Honorable mention, for Prathama Blood Centre, Ahmedabad
- The AR Emerging Architecture Award 2003 – Editors choice, for Ashwinikumar Crematorium, Surat
- K Cement ‘Young Architect of the Year’ 2002-Winner
- K Cement ‘Young Architect of the Year’ 2001-Winner
The firm’s standards are adhered to by an in house team of dedicated personnel in the field of Architecture, Interior design and Product design, leading to a holistic design approach coupled with innovation and acute attention to functionality and detail.
Gurjit Singh Matharoo besides his professional practice is also actively involved in academic work and has been a visiting faculty since 1991 and was the Chair of Architectural Design from 2016-2019 at the Centre of Environmental Planning and Technology in Ahmedabad, from where he graduated. He is deeply passionate about the mechanics and design of automobiles.
Marbled House, Ahmedabad
Marbled: Adj. To be permeated with an intricate network of channels or veins (Chamiers English Dictionary)
A private residence for one of the city’s largest suppliers of construction-grade stone, the client’s background in high end materials and craftsmanship makes him deal with a whole host of city’s architects everyday.
Despite the obvious temptation for a tectonically driven project that draws on the elite exclusivity of such a material, his concern for a new interpretation of the material and the spaces that it could generate brought him and us together.
The building’s form becomes reminiscent of the stones that stack up inside the client’s store yard. Stone blocks cleanly sheared into slabs by an industrial gangsaw, lean sawtooth against each other. Like bookends, they are propped up by a steel frame held in place under their own weight.
The structure of the building draws upon the mutual reciprocity of such a system, as concrete frames are pinned down by slanted exterior stone walls of varying heights that they in turn support.
Providing a naturally waterproof and long lasting exterior, niches left over by this careful stacking imbue the house with the nooks and crannies that accommodate the essential private functions that the living spaces must provide: from the sacred prayer alcove to the unsightly pipe runs.
As these polished stone exterior walls are acrobatically propped up, with a slight 2° incline they climb towards the sky. Given the client’s access to a highly skilled manual workforce of local craftsmen, the subtly articulated detail design is surrendered to the finesse of the stonemasons’ expertise.
The common local affinity with intricate carvings, jalis (thinly whittled stone screens) and an architecture that relies on a high quality of finish is reversed as the house makes use of the client’s gargantuan ramshackle of mid-grade random off-cut pieces.
Each wall is assigned a different type of discarded stone constituent, combining them in a heterogenous compsition to act as a navigational tool to aid the house’s occupation.
Each plane becomes rough around its borders: Piled, hewn stone sheets serrate their crests as the fringe of each wall appears to striate into those in its background. The petrified life of the stones is revived by the shifting overlap of stark shadows that trace the vertical paving and crevices throughout the day.
Openings are punched through this seemingly precarious arrangement of enveloping walls only at the areas where the supporting concrete frames encircle their inner faces, its meter thickness casting even dark shadows over them.
The living spaces benefit particularly from this treatment of openings: The invisible causeway that channels the sky through the master bedroom and the double height living expanse flows through such a portal out to the verandah and landscape beyond.
The master bedroom’s location straddling this particular vein enables it to unfurl into the rest of the house. It feels a connectedness with the house at large and exerts the maximum control over it, yet is afforded a detached privacy.
The house’s interior is consolidated in the south west corner of the site, its footprint as slender as possible to maximize the open area for house to bleed into. Two perpendicular wings are formed as such; the first for living that greets one upon entry past the house’s flank side and back on oneself, and a second private one housing the bedrooms.
The bedrooms are insulated either side by a cushion of their ancillary spaces, WCs and dressing rooms, as this wing extends into the margins of the site to cap off the path leading to the house and form a hidden utility area.
Despite the apparent segregation that these moves appear to enforce, the house is organised so that areas wash into each other: This is generated by dissolving corners, resulting in the fusion of spaces as much in the vertical dimension as on the horizontal plane.
This ensures the unimpeded provision of natural light and ventilation throughout the house, as undefined spatial crevices unite the basement level with the sky high above. The staircase cascades from the top to bottom of the house through the living spaces, epitomizing the idea of marbling the house with undeviating bands of spatial veins.
The Marbled House is situated in a quiet and leafy suburban corner plot in a gated community on the outskirts of the burgeoning city of Ahmedabad. It sits amongst a monotony of serried plots that play host to its residents’ meaningless exploits in forms and styles, to try to make their houses’ different from one other.
A homogenous pulp of such an approach, The Marbled House seeks instead to set its autonomy in stone through a marriage between program, client and craft.