Architecture | About India

What problem was this building built to solve?

Every striking building in this pillar was solving a problem before it was making a statement. The stepwell stored a monsoon; the courtyard pulled cool air through a house; the rock-cut monastery stayed cool because the rock around it did. Once you can name the problem, the ornament stops looking decorative and starts looking like the place where the structure is working hardest — which is exactly where the carvers were sent.

Inside this pillar

8 entries All 8 entries are written. 11 further candidates, listed by state

Stepwells were infrastructure

Not a monument with stairs: a public water system, a social space and a summer refuge in one structure.

The courtyard haveli

A house arranged around a vertical shaft of cool night air, with screens that cut glare without cutting the breeze.

Rock-cut monasteries: Ajanta and Ellora

Buildings subtracted from basalt rather than assembled from it, which is why their interiors stay cool.

The Dravidian temple form

Gopuram outside, vimana over the shrine, and a town that grows along the axis between them.

The Nagara temple form

A curvilinear tower over the shrine, and a completely different idea of what a temple façade is for.

Indo-Saracenic: the colonial hybrid

British engineers assembling Indian motifs into railway stations, courts and museums — and what they got wrong.

Chandigarh as an argument

A city planned for a newly partitioned state, and the twenty-year argument about whether the plan worked.

The bungalow and the verandah

A Bengali rural house that became the world's most exported domestic form — and lost its climate logic on the way.

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