Kandariya Mahadev Temple

This is the largest and most typical Khajuraho temple. There are abput 900 statues. Dedicated to Lord Shiva, it soars 31 m high. The sanctum enshrines a lingam, while the main shrine is ornately carved and depicts various gods, goddesses, apsaras (heavenly maidens) in elaborate detail. The entrance arch, the massive pillars and ceilings are adorned with exquisite carvings that leave the visitor spellbound. Beyond the archway of the Kandariya Mahadev, lie the six interior compartments; the portico, main hall, transept, vestibule, sanctum and ambulatory. The ceilings are particularly noteworthy and the pillars supporting them have intricately carved capitals. The transept's outer walls have three horizontal panels showing deities of the Hindu pantheon, and groups of lovers, a pageant of sensuousness, vibrantly alive.

Shalimar Bagh

A subtle air of leisure and repose, a romantic indefinable spell, pervades the royal Shalimar: this leafy garden of dim vistas, shallow terraces, smooth sheets of falling water, and wide canals, with calm reflections broken only by the stepping stones across the streams.

While the recent history and development of the Mughal types of gardens is credited to Emperor Jahangir of theMughal Dynasty, the ancient history of the garden that existed here is traced to the 2^nd century when it was built during the reign of Pravarsena II. Praversena II founded the city of Srinagar and ruled in Kashmir from 79 AD to 139 AD. He had built a cottage for his stay at the northeastern corner of the Dal Lake and had named it as Shalimar (‘Shalimar’ in Sanskit means "Abode or Hall of Love”). It is at this location that Emperor Jahangir built his celebrated Shalimar Bagh, his dream project to please his queen. During the Mughal period in particular, Emperor Jahangir and his wife Nur Jahan were so enamoured of Kashmir that during summer they moved to Srinagar with their full court entourage from Delhi, at least 13 times. Shalimar Bagh was their imperial summer residence, and also the Royal Court.

The layout of the garden is an adaptation of another Islamic garden layout known as the Chahar Bagh in Persia. This garden built on a flat land on a square plan with four radiating arms from a central location as the water source, could not be exactly replicated to the hilly conditions in the Kashmir valley.

Thus, modifications to suit the location were designed, which involved the main channel running through the garden axially from top to the lowest point. This central channel, known as the Shah Nahar, is the main axis of the garden. It runs through three terraces. This layout saved on radial arms and the shape became rectangular, instead of a square plan of the Chahar Bagh.

The garden was linked to the open Dal Lake water through a canal of about 1 mile (1.6 km) length and 12 yards (11 m) in width that ran through swampy quagmire. Willow groves and rice terraces fringed the lake edge. Broad green paths bordered the lake with rows of chinar trees. The garden was laid in trellised walkways lined by avenues of aspen trees planted at 2 feet (0.61 m) interval.

The first terrace is a public garden or the outer garden ending in the Diwan-e-Aam (public audience hall). In this hall, a small black marble throne was installed over the waterfall.

The second terrace garden along the axial canal, slightly broader, has two shallow terraces. The Diwan-i-Khas (the Hall of Private Audience), which was accessible only to the noblemen or guests of the court, now derelict, is in its centre. However, the carved stone bases and a fine platform surrounded by fountains are still seen. The royal bathrooms are located on the north-west boundary of this enclosure. The fountain pools of the Diwan-i Khas, the Diwan-i-Amm, and in turn, the Zenana terraces are supplied in succession.

In the third terrace, the axial water channel flows through the Zenana garden, which is flanked by the Diwan-i-Khas and chinar trees. At the entrance to this terrace, there are two small pavilions or guard rooms (built in Kashmir style on stone plinth) that is the restricted and controlled entry zone of the royal harem. Shahajahan built a baradari of black marble, called the Black Pavilion in the zenana garden. It is encircled by a fountain pool that receives its supply from a higher terrace. A double cascade falls against a low wall carved with small niches (chini khanas), behind the pavilion. Two smaller, secondary water canals lead from the Black Pavilion to a small baradari. Above the third level, two octagonal pavilions define the end wall of the garden.

The Shalimar Bagh is well known for chini khanas, or arched niches, behind garden waterfalls. They are a unique feature in the Bagh. These niches were lighted at night with oil lamps, which gave a fairy tale appearance to the water falls. However, now the niches hold pots of flower pots that reflect their colors behind the cascading water.

Another unusual architectural feature mentioned is about the doors of the Baradari. In the garden complex, the Baradari had four exquisite doors made of stones supported by pillars. It is conjectured that these stone doors were ruins from old temples that were demolished by Shahajahan. The garden also provided large water troughs where a variety of fountains were fixed.

Even in later years, during Maharaja’s rule, the gardens were well maintained and continue to be so even now as it is one of the prominent visitor attractions around the Dal Lake.

The garden is considered to be very beautiful during the autumn and spring seasons due to the colour change in leaves of the famed Chinar trees.

The gardens were the inspiration for other gardens of the same name, notably the Shalimar Bagh, Delhi in Delhi (built in 1653, which now also has an upscale colony) and Shalimar Gardens in Lahore, Pakistan built by Emperor Shah Jahan in 1641.

Housing in Mumbai..

Bad effects are from the heritage point of view that first and foremost, grade III listed heritage buildings should be excluded from redevelopment under rule 33(7) and 33(9). Due to this rule being applied indiscriminately across all so called 'old' buildings, irrespective of their heritage value, they are going ahead and pulling down good buildings too.

Localized poor condition in some parts of a heritage building are being shown in surveys as completely bad so that they can pull down the entire building, sell the old wood, material, etc. as well as consume higher FSI. It is a complete racket.

Developers support the modification to the rule as they get more FSI under the modified rule. The proposed cluster redevelopment scheme proposes an FSI of 4 or even higher, so they keep loading the city with new development with minimum open spaces, etc.

The modification has several harmful long term impacts for the city and people such as load to existing infrastructure of the city, worsening the quality of life, promoting poor construction, promoting a new haphazard and thoughtless architectural and urban design language that will alter Mumbai's character.

One of the most basic points against the modification is to question why FREE housing or accommodation of any kind should be given to tenants / occupants of space in the city. Why should a person occupying a tenement of 220 sqft or less get 300 or 400 sq. ft. and what happens to the Rent Control Act?

The modification is driven by vote bank politics and not by any desire to improve the condition of the city. It is a fact that there are more tenants than landlords in the island city; hence the politicians want to appease the greater number of people. It is also a fact that the politicians are themselves builders and developers in Mumbai, and hence have modified the law to suit them.

If you study the density and pattern of development of an area such as C-Ward (that is proposed to be redeveloped using the cluster redevelopment model), then you can see the existing architectural, social and cultural grain of the area, that is finely woven due to its low-rise and dense pattern of redevelopment.

This pattern of building will be replaced by the even more dense (due to additional loading of FSI) high-rise pattern of building, that will completely alter the fabric of the old city.

Much of the suburbs of Mumbai are largely characterless and homogeneous due to the building byelaws that allow this kind of thoughtless redevelopment. Infrastructure in the suburbs is already inadequate to cope with the population that is living there. The modifications to DC Rule 33(7) and 33(9) will similarly overload the existing infrastructure of the island city, leading to a reduced quality of life for all who stay or use this space.

Blanket solutions and rules are not applicable in a city like Mumbai. Different areas require different solutions.

What is required is:

- a rational survey of the existing building stock to be done, to identify poor buildings,

- amend or abolish the rent control act that has distorted the value of land and housing in the island city,

- apply sensitive and sensible (vs. lucrative) solutions to the existing problem being faced

- give incentives to people who want to repair their buildings skillfully

- allow reconstruction more through owners rather than builders

- Remove free redevelopment and offers for free housing - those who can afford to stay here should stay, rest should move northwards etc.

Dis(s)tress

The language of architecture is a vague term used to classify them selves. What it means is rather defined which rather confines which rather puts into a fixation of constraints.

"Witness" rather to be 'experienced' which is a linear technology as it requires an address and a start of lines...

A state of time, which see around a world of constraints, which see an opposing origin. Radicalism. RADIX. An opposing/ derogatory language abusing to the world of so called "purity".

"Get off my cloud"

Coop Hamilton - language- of- rather- buildings is a brilliant usage of deconstruction and post modernist architecture. Architecture to comment on these manifestations of the architectural neo avant - garde, vilifying the presumed aesthetization of the style and parodying its false motives.

The work of Eisman and Tschumi strive towards willful and theoretical deformation towards the metrically problematical solution to existing confusing traditional mass.

Architects/ theorists such as Eisman and Tschumi used their own writings to legitimize their architectural projects – a self reflexivity that isn’t without a merit, at least as a limiting point for radicalizing the trajectory of built form.

Coop – Hamilton upsets the purists’ nature of the projects with deliberately apologetic program, , allowing the sheer force using the innate aspects of architecture – such as tension, counterbalance their works, allowing the sheer force of building materials to impact upon their structural selves and inducing a struggle from within the actual materials.

What is rather seen is a result of stripping which results over action and a reaction.

The resulting forms are a search beyond – mere physics – a result of time.

Destroying in order to Recover…

Deconstruction

Deconstruction was first developed by French philosopher Jaques Derrida. The definition for deconstruction is not easy to understand, and Derrida and his interpreters actually intend it to be difficult. It was first meant to be a method of interpretation and analysis of a text or a speech. He introduced the concept of deconstruction as a text or speech. The entire idea was to draw out conflicting logics of sense and implications. the main objective was to show that text never exactly meant what it said. Though it had been applied not only to text but also to the visual arts and architecture.

The approach of deconstruction in architecture is to get architects, think of things in a new way, to view architecture in bits and pieces. Also to develop buildings which shows how differently from traditional buildings c, buildings can be built without losing their utility and still complying with the fundamental laws of physics. Especially, in 1988, when deconstruction was first promoted in architecture.

Derrida takes the word deconstruction from the work of Martin Heidegger. In the summer of 1927, Martin Heidegger delivered a lecture course now published under the title, Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Given the topic of his lectures, Heidegger appropriately begins them with a discussion of the nature of philosophy and, particularly of the philosophical movement called phenomenology. Borrowing creatively from his teacher, Edmund Husserl, Heidegger says that phenomenology is the name for a method of doing philosophy; he says that the method includes three steps -- reduction, construction, and destruction -- and he explains that these three are mutually pertinent to one another. Construction necessarily involves destruction, he says, and then he identifies destruction with deconstruction, Abbau (20-23). Heidegger explains what he means by philosophical destruction by using an ordinary German word that we can translate literally "unbuild."

Different architects of different places seemed to be placing buildings and bits of buildings at odd angles so that they clashed and even penetrated each other. The geometry in these architects had been set up, but has at least one overlaid and clashed with the other. Also, there is much different kind of clashes such as: clashes in history and....leaves construction without its form.

Ironically, given much of the current discussion of Heidegger's work and the work that derives from his, Heidegger's answer is, "No." We can use these concepts, horizons, and approaches against themselves to discover what produced them. We might, for example, think about Aristotle's discussion of form and matter, using those very terms to show their inadequacy. What, after all, is matter? Any answer I give is in terms of another form rather than in terms of matter. Questions: "What is that desk made of; what is its material?" Answer: "Wood." But the word wood gives us a form, not a matter. I can ask, "What is the wood made of?" and give a reasonable answer, though one still in terms of form.

As we use the terms matter and form against them, what starts out looking like a perfectly sensible question becomes problematic. By problematizing the distinction, we begin to get at least a glimpse of the problem to which Aristotle was responding. Perhaps we begin to wonder -- to think -- in the same way that he did. If we do, perhaps we begin to do philosophy with regards to Aristotle's questions rather than simply to repeat the scholarly exegesis of Aristotle's philosophy.

Deconstruction can be a matter of showing whom the text has omitted, overlooked, or forgotten. There are various others whom we may forget. Sometimes we fail to remember God, someone with whom, contrary to many expectations.