The Grid Or Not the Grid

Byline: Sheba Akhtar The exhibition titled 'Architecture Beyond the Board', with the theme 'Architecture as I interpret it ...', featuring the works of seven Karachi-based architects, opened at Koel Gallery, Karachi, in December 2009. A notable feature of the exhibition was that the quantity, but not necessarily the quality, of the work exhibited by Sehr Bokhari Latif, Arshad Faruqi, Murlidhar Dawani, Tariq Alexander Qaiser, Najeeb Omar, Tariq Hasan and Omar Kasmani was proportional to the size of their practices. This fact is worthy of consideration, because it really focuses on the making of art in general, and architecture in particular. The viewer expects a painting or a sculpture to have been personally executed by the painter or the sculptor. But architecture, while being designed by an architect, is not built by him or her; it is, by its very nature, a collaborative art, in which the creative energies of an entire design and construction team are channeled under the supervision of the architect.