Alternate Architecture 9 - India

a piece my wife and I wrote for our Robert James Eidlitz Fellowship application:


In India, a thousand tiers of culture overlap, written layer after layer upon each other, never erasing, never revising, sometimes obscuring, but never clarifying each other.  Modern kitsch coexists with traditional dance in big budget Indian movies.  Fast food mixes with traditional architecture.  And religion infuses everything.  Out of all this explodes one of the world’s fastest growing economies, largest populations, and most misunderstood cultures.  India’s emerging influence can be felt around the world, along with its deep history, exotic culture, and unique aesthetic.  Its history is full of dramatic clashes between Islam and Hindu, tourist and pilgrim, commercialism and tradition.  Its intellectual growth amazes, while its overcrowded poverty staggers.  Studying how these warring cultural influences coexist within the Indian mind might tell us (designers and artists) a lot about our own futures in a world of increasingly conflicted and dynamic forces.

Indian architecture is an enigma.  It's an explosion of colors, forms, and figures.  For many in the West, Indian architecture is a complete unknown.  It's forms and structures are far away and unfamiliar.  

In Sanskrit, the word vastu means architecture or surrounding; shastra means system or rules.  Thus Vastu Shastras are an architectural design system, or rules for creating surroundings.  These ancient Indian texts make up perhaps the oldest design philosophy in the world.  Amazingly, although the shastras are now thousands of years old, Indians still use their principles to design and construct buildings today (as the Chinese still use Feng Shui). 

It is the Vastu Shastras that enumerate the fundamental principles of Indian (Hindu) design familiar to architectural history students, including the mandala (sacred plan diagram), maana (proportional relationships), and aayaadi (rules for human wellness).  However, the Vastu Shastras do not distinguish between architectural design, sculpture, painting, and city planning.  To the ancient authors of the vastu shastras, sculptures, buildings, and cities were simply details of the greater cosmic order. 

Mamallapuram’s Pancha Pandava Rathas (“five chariots of Pandava”) are illustrated examples of the Vastu Shastras.  Carved from solid rock to resemble Indian temples in the Dravidian style, the rathas contain, in miniature, all the essential characteristics of Indian temple architecture.  Built as early as c.630-670, the Rathas seem to have predicted the development of Dravidian temple architecture in the following centuries.  Small “test models” of temple design, these detailed sculptures are a guide to the complex language of Indian architecture.

The spectacular temple-caves at Ellora abound with 600 years of artistic detail.  12 Buddhist, 17 Hindu, and 5 Jain caves share the west-facing wall of a cliff overlooking an ancient trade route.  Although devoted to three different religions, some of the temples are believed to have been built and occupied simultaneously.  Two of the most spectacular caves, the Buddhist Monastery Cave Tin Tala and the Hindu Kailasa Temple, are believed to have been under construction at the same time.  The Kailasa Temple, in particular, is one of the most amazing works of architecture and sculpture in India.  Hewn from solid bedrock, the 90m long by 53m wide by 30m tall temple is both a fully designed Indian temple and a single, massive sculpture! 

Madurai city is the embodiment of the Vastu Shastras’ Mandala plan.  The streets are arranged in concentric squares radiating outward from the amazing Sri Meenakshi temple.  Mass rituals reinforce the power of the Mandala design with huge processions through the streets in a clockwise direction around the temple.  The Mandala design of the city is a detail experienced at every turn in Madurai, whether walking down the city streets named for Tamil months, wandering through the thousand pillared hall of the Meenakshi temple, or observing the ancient art in the “Tank of the Golden Lotuses”. 

A “detail” in Indian architecture is more than just a piece or a part; it is a reflection and a guide to the whole.  Each stone embodies the spirit of the sculpture; each sculpture embodies the spirit of the structure; each structure embodies the culture; each culture embodies the order of the world; the order of the world embodies the order of the cosmos.  Each detail contains the logic of the whole. These details are not merely worth studying for their contribution to a greater whole; rather they are compelling in themselves for what they teach us about the deeper order of Indian design. The gods are in the details because the details are the architecture.