Crafting Hands To craft means to create with hands that accumulate knowledge, material, and technique. It is the lived tradition, human skill, and community heritage expressed through handmade arts, textiles,…
Begin with a photograph of the kind that survives in colonial albums. A gorge, pale boulders, and the Ganga running fast between forested hills. A thin line is drawn across…
The Evolution of Indian Cities Through Historical Archives Historical archives throw light on the transformations that have taken place in Indian cities. Maps, surveys, photographs, and administrative records are valuable…
As the morning bells ring, the Panchalingeshwara Temple complex in Begur welcomes worshippers into a sacred landscape that has endured for more than a millennium. Surrounded by the expanding urban…
In olden days, people built buildings with local materials and construction techniques. The architectural style depended on local masons and carpenters. Temples were built based on the local beliefs and…
An idle power station along the Huangpu River in Shanghai had stopped producing electricity. Still, the city was looking forward to what the future held, skyscrapers going up and a…
The history of a neighbourhood is often recorded not only in monuments but also in its streets, houses, places of worship and everyday commercial spaces. The Mattancherry neighbourhood in Kochi,…
At the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, what’s intriguing is that even sunlight must permeate through a certain amount of architecture. It slips through numerous architectural features before reaching the passengers…
A familiar street can look entirely different in an old photograph. Set beside a present-day view, it becomes more than a mere trace of the past; it offers clues to…
Dakshinachitra, a living heritage museum about 25 kilometres south of Chennai overlooking the Bay of Bengal along the beautiful East Coast Road, was conceived and created by the Madras Craft…
Few buildings in Delhi have changed their purpose as often as the Dara Shikoh Library. The name suggests a single purpose “reading room”, but its typology is much more complex.…
Walking through Keraton Kasepuhan (Kasepuhan Palace) in Cirebon, West Java, one would first notice its multilayered architectural language: Hindu-Buddhist, Javanese, Islamic, Chinese and European influences. Those different histories became embedded…