Comprehensibly, the Chandigarh experience has left an indelible mark on India and on the generation of architects who grew up with Le Corbusier’s heroic local exploit. The architectural themes developed in the place that calls itself The City of Beauty find paramount continuity in the work of the 2018 Pritzker Prize winner Balkrishna Doshi, who worked with Le Corbusier in Chandigarh. This is taken up with evident sculptural strength by Matharoo Associates, founded in Ahmedabad in 1991 by Gurjit Singh Matharoo (Ajmer, Rajasthan, 1966).

Shape remains at the centre of the office’s design code, and is developed through the application of expressive principles, materials (above all reinforced concrete, naturally) and spatial layouts explicitly related to experiments from over a century ago. Despite these factors, the work’s aesthetic and functional qualities are connected to local sensibility and the character of “universal” architectural principles. It is devoid of the facile compromises and sensationalistic short cuts that are so diffuse in the glossy sampling going on today.

Matharoo’s coherence is represented in two public buildings, both from 2018. The first is “Open Door”, the Credai headquarters (Confederation of Real Estate Developers Association of India) in Ahmedabad. The other is “Man-Made God”, a Sindhi temple and guest house for pilgrims in Ajmer, Rajasthan. Congruity is condensed in a single-family house called “Cut Bend Fold Play” in Chennai (2018).

Rigorous limits to the layout were imposed by the holistic Hindu principles of Vaastu Shastra (“science of architecture”), which strives for an alignment with the natural elements. A continuum of volumes and surfaces are “cut, bent and folded” around a central court, generating a delicate play between the parts that maintains the entire architectural organism in equilibrium. One day, it might even be described as The House of Beauty.