This book looks at the relationship between culture and power expressed in architectural forms employed by the British in India. These buildings reflect the choices made by the British in their politics as imperial rulers.

This volume focuses on socio- spatial practices of indigenous communities in India. It explores the interrelation between the built environments and lifeworlds, i.e. practices, patterns, and structures of everyday life. The chapters deal with different ideas and definitions of indigeneity, while also addressing the complex equations between the production and perception of built forms, indigenous technologies, on the one hand, and social, environmental and political contexts, questions of aesthetics, identity, and self-representation on the other. From Adivasi art and sacred sites to craft villages and nomadic pastoralists in western India, from indigenous bangle makers in urban north India to terracotta crafts people on the south, each chapter focuses on different communities and the contours of their contemporary lifeworlds. The contributions actively attempt to foreground the logic and perspectives of the communities themselves as the epistemological centre of the architectural and material discourses on indigeneity. This book will be useful for students, teachers, and researchers of architecture, urban design, urban studies, urban development and planning, anthropology, sociology, and museum studies. It will also be of interest to urban planners and designers, policy planners, local government authorities, and professionals engaged in the discipline.

This book on “New Architecture and Urbanism: Development of Indian Traditions” builds on the contributions from various architects, planners, educationists, decision-makers & others from across the world who gathered together to create a forum for the promotion of traditional processes and techniques for the creation of the built environment. This forum was initiated by INTBAU India, The International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism in India, and supported by The Nabha Foundation. This book presents the arguments, axioms and case studies related to Traditional Architecture and Urbanism in a sequential format. Firstly it examines the “New ways of looking at Heritage” by separating it from pure history into a living and evolving process. The book looks at what defines traditional methods and their relevance to the contemporary context. It also examines the aspects of Continuity and Contextual frameworks in the built environment. The section on “Sustainable Buildings, Places and Communities” explores the many facets of locally driven processes from the viewpoint of tradition and sustainability. These include many community based planning methods and their applications in shaping the built environment, aspects of environmental sustainability and on how appropriateness could be ingrained into current architectural education. Lastly, the book delves into a number of executed examples in architecture seeking to learn from tradition and examples in “place-making urbanism” which in turn promotes humane, walkable and connected neighbourhoods.

This book provides an understanding of the very roots of what constitutes the Indian context by examining its notions of time, space and existence. the study unravels the inherent virtues of traditional Indian architecture and interprets them as universal dictums, relevant to reinstate in contemporary times.

The author examines the ways in which a historic, and so-called 'traditional' city quietly mutated into one that was modern in its own terms not only in form but also in its use and meaning.

This book explores conceptions of Indian architecture and how the historical buildings of the subcontinent have been conceived and described. Investigating the design philosophies of architects and styles of analysis by architectural historians, the book explores how systems of design and ideas about aesthetics have governed both the construction of buildings in India and their subsequent interpretation. How did the political directives of the British colonial period shape the manner in which pioneer archaeologists wrote the histories of India's buildings? How might such accounts conflict with indigenous ones, or with historical aesthetics? How might paintings of buildings by British and Indian artists suggest different ways of understanding their subjects? In what ways must we revise our conceptions of space and time to understand the narrative art which adorns India's most ancient monuments? These are among the questions addressed by the contributors to the volume.

A place of astonishing contrasts, India is home to some of the world’s most ancient architectures as well as some of its most modern. It was the focus of some of the most important works created by Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, among other lesser-known masters, and it is regarded by many as one of the key sites of mid-twentieth century architectural design. As Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava show in this book, however, India’s history of modern architecture began long before the nation’s independence as a modern state in 1947. Going back to the nineteenth century, Scriver and Srivastava look at the beginnings of modernism in colonial India and the ways that public works and patronage fostered new design practices that directly challenged the social order and values invested in the building traditions of the past. They then trace how India’s architecture embodies the dramatic shifts in Indian society and culture during the last century. Making sense of a broad range of sources, from private papers and photographic collections to the extensive records of the Indian Public Works Department, they provide the most rounded account of modern architecture in India that has yet been available.