(“Text as submitted by architect”)
Sangeeta Merchant
Sangeeta Merchant co-founded the architectural studio SPASM in 1995. She was educated at the Academy of Architecture in Mumbai. Over the past two decades, her practice has focused on single-family homes, luxury villas, and commercial office towers, and she has been awarded the AD50 and AD100 Awards in Design for the past ten consecutive years. Current work includes residential, commercial, and mixed-use projects in India, Dubai, and Tanzania.
Merchant has been a guest juror at the Academy of Architecture and the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture (KRVIA) in Mumbai.
Sanjeev Panjabi
Sanjeev Panjabi co-founded the architectural studio SPASM in 1995. He was educated at the Academy of Architecture in Mumbai. Over the past two decades, his practice has focused on single-family homes, luxury villas, and commercial office towers, and he has been awarded the AD50 and AD100 Awards in Design for the past ten consecutive years. Current work includes residential, commercial, and mixed-use projects in India, Dubai, and Tanzania.
Panjabi has been a guest juror at the Academy of Architecture and the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture (KRVIA) in Mumbai.
Practice Ideology
SPASM has a flamenco kind of approach and Ping-Pong kind of pace. Shared experiences over the years make every project they take on enjoyable. Their approach is very chaotic upfront. The team is intrinsically involved from the get-go; several ideas are put on the table and worked through laterally. Essentially, their expression is based on the concerns they develop while understanding what the task is at hand. These concerns are then translated into a physical tangible buildable construct using their own personal intuitive logic – rational decisions based on relevance, appropriateness, technology, budgets, craftsmanship, locale, the list is too long. SPASM is not interested in being avant-garde. Like Marcel Proust said, “To see new landscapes you don’t need to always journey, but have new eyes.” They try to be very human in their approach and not too fussy in their details. They do try to bring a poetic touch to their expression but never at the cost of appropriateness. An eastern kind of “inclusivity” is sought; every aspect of building, occupation and future ageing of projects is mulled over – many, many, many times over. They consider every commission an opportunity to discover themselves, through what they propose and build.
“SPASM is a small controlled practice. We’re interested in an intimate relationship with our studio, our team, our collaborators, our models, drawings, visualizations, products, buildings and our clients. We do this because we love it. We sense displeasure; we respect questioning and constructive criticism on all the projects. We don’t know how to run our studio any other way. The extremely personal way our studio runs gives us immense happiness. Our ultimate objective is simply happiness – a sense of doing something.”
SPASM
