Wit-ness to Mat-Haroo

Name: Wit-ness to Mat-Haroo
SKU: 91190
Price: 29.95 USD
Availability: BackOrder

Spirit

$29.95

Witty True-life Incidents from an architect’s Professional life with bizarre endings narrated in a satire short story form.

Size: 8.46” x 5.63” Portrait
ISBN: 978-1-961856-46-2
Binding: Softbound
Pages: 202pp
Publication Date: Spring 2025

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SKU: 91190 Categories: Architecture, Books, Featured, Monograph, New Releases, Pre-order Tags: architects, Architecture, book publishing, design books, humor, india, memoir, professional life, satire, short stories

Description
Additional information

Description

Witty True-life Incidents from an architect’s Professional life with bizarre endings narrated in a satire short story form.

Additional information

Weight	2 lbs
Dimensions	10 × 10 × 1 in
Publication date	November 2022
Size	8.5" x 11" portrait

Details

Overview

An insightful collection of essays on the overlooked sign. Each chapter explores the extraordinary connection that culture and society have to this common object. The book blends historical overview, graphic taxonomy, and design criticism on eleven signage types, ranging from signs that say no, to pharmacy signs, and all in-between. Every chapter uncovers the reasoning and logic of how and why our built environment is annotated the way it is form the simplest of signs to the largest of signs.

“Wit-ness to Mat-Haroo Spirit is a series of charmingly written stories by architects Gurjit Singh Matharoo and Vagish Naganur that shed light on the nuanced relationships and challenges architects contend with. These anecdotes span a 30-year career, providing a fascinating insight into the inner workings of an acclaimed practice – an uncharted territory thus far in architectural writing. Filled with self-deprecating humour in its folds, it gives us a quirky look into the special place the profession occupies, going beyond mere physical edifices to symbolize culture, history, and human connections. The stories delve into themes of love, loss and the transient nature of human existence, etched deep into the pages of this book.”

V. Raghunathan
Academic, author, corporate citizen, columnist and hobbyist
Bengaluru, India

“The stories remind us that ultimately, the successful architectural endeavours, no matter how grand or innovative, are deeply human at their core. They are products of our collective aspirations, struggles and creativity. They demonstrate that architecture, like all human efforts, is an ongoing dialogue between the individual and the collective, the past and the future. As we explore these distinct yet interconnected attempts, through the lucid storytelling by the authors, we see that the pursuit of architectural excellence is, indeed, only human after all.”

Lucio Muniain
Painter, musician and architect. Collector of music and art.
Mexico City, Mexico

Authors

Vagish Naganur is a graduate in Architecture and a postgraduate 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, unraveling 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 has 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.

News

“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.”

Additional Info

Size: 8.46” x 5.63” Portrait
ISBN: 978-1-961856-46-2
Binding: Softbound
Pages: 202pp
Publication Date: Spring 2025
World Rights: Available