A daily ritual
One building to study, one principle to carry, every day. A small habit for a long craft — Indian icons and the global canon, with a quiet streak to keep you coming back to the drawing board.
Raj Rewal & Mahendra Raj · 1972
New Delhi · India
The world's largest space-frame in concrete — and a cautionary tale about losing modern heritage.
Look at this today: The hand-cast concrete space-frame, and why its 2017 demolition still matters to the profession.
Read moreIn India, a courtyard is a climate device before it is a composition — it ventilates, shades and cools.
Louis Kahn
1974 · Ahmedabad
Kahn's brick masterwork in India — monumental geometry, deep shade and a campus that teaches by its corridors.
How the giant circular and segmental brick openings turn structure into shade and frame the campus views.
Balkrishna Doshi
1980 · Ahmedabad
The Pritzker laureate's own studio — vaulted, half-sunken, china-mosaic roofs that breathe with the climate.
The half-buried vaults and earth berms used as passive cooling, not just sculpture.
Charles Correa
1983 · Mumbai
A high-rise that rediscovers the bungalow's verandah — climate-responsive luxury for the Mumbai sky.
How the double-height garden terraces are cut into the corners to catch the sea breeze and shade the interior.
Charles Correa
1992 · Jaipur
A arts centre planned on the nine-square navagraha mandala — myth made into circulation.
The nine squares and the displaced ninth block — geometry carrying cosmology.
Charles Correa
1996 · Bhopal
A state assembly that reinterprets the stupa, the kund and the courtyard at civic scale.
How a single great circle organises a complex programme around open-to-sky courts.
Balkrishna Doshi
1966 · Ahmedabad
A school of architecture with almost no doors — learning spills into shaded, open studios.
The open, north-lit studios and the blurred line between inside, verandah and ground.
Balkrishna Doshi & M. F. Husain
1995 · Ahmedabad
A cave-like gallery of tortoise-shell domes — architecture as continuous, hand-finished surface.
The ferrocement shell domes and how top-light washes the curved interior.
Le Corbusier
1962 · Chandigarh
The civic heart of India's first planned modern city — béton brut, the great portico, the hyperboloid chamber.
The upturned portico roof as a water-and-sun device, and the monsoon-scaled brise-soleil.
Le Corbusier
1954 · Ahmedabad
A compact lesson in tropical modernism — the brise-soleil as the whole architecture.
How the deep concrete brise-soleil is angled differently on each façade for its sun.
Raj Rewal & Mahendra Raj
1972 · New Delhi
The world's largest space-frame in concrete — and a cautionary tale about losing modern heritage.
The hand-cast concrete space-frame, and why its 2017 demolition still matters to the profession.
Morphogenesis
2008 · Jaipur
Contemporary passive design — a jaali skin and a sunken court make the desert habitable.
The double-skin jaali and the step-well-inspired sunken courtyard that pre-cools the air.
Arup Associates
2001 · Ladakh
High-altitude sustainability — solar orientation, Trombe walls and ventilated dry-toilets at 3,500 m.
How orientation, thermal mass and a Trombe wall heat a school in a cold desert without fuel.
Ustad Ahmad Lahauri (attrib.)
1653 · Agra
The benchmark of Mughal proportion, symmetry and material — marble, pietra dura and the char-bagh.
The perfect bilateral symmetry and how the plinth, minarets and reflecting channel set the proportion.
Solanki dynasty
11th c. · Patan, Gujarat
An inverted temple as a stepwell — water architecture of extraordinary sculptural depth.
How the descending steps and tiered pavilions turn water access into sacred section.
Rajaraja Chola I
1010 · Thanjavur
A thousand-year-old Chola vimana of granite — engineering and devotion at colossal scale.
The 66 m granite vimana and how its mass is carried without mortar.
Mughal (Akbar)
1571 · near Agra
A whole imperial city in red sandstone — a masterclass in courts, screens and trabeated stone.
The jaali screens and the way courtyards and platforms order the entire complex.
Eastern Ganga dynasty
1250 · Konark, Odisha
A temple conceived as the sun-god's stone chariot — sculpture and architecture made one.
How the carved wheels and horses fuse narrative sculpture with built form.
Mirak Mirza Ghiyas
1572 · Delhi
The first great Mughal garden-tomb — the prototype the Taj would later perfect.
The char-bagh layout and the double-dome that the Taj inherits.
Louis Kahn
1982 · Dhaka, Bangladesh
Kahn's late magnum opus on the subcontinent — primary geometry, monumental light and water.
The vast geometric openings that bring indirect light deep into the concrete mass.
Frank Lloyd Wright
1939 · Pennsylvania, USA
The house that hovers over a waterfall — organic architecture cantilevered into the landscape.
The cantilevered concrete terraces and how interior and rock ledge interlock.
Le Corbusier
1931 · Poissy, France
The built manifesto of the Five Points — pilotis, free plan, ribbon window, roof garden, free façade.
Walk the architectural promenade: the ramp that turns moving through the house into the design.
Mies van der Rohe
1929 · Barcelona, Spain
The purest statement of flowing space — free-standing planes of marble, glass and water.
How non-load-bearing walls slide past the column grid to make space continuous.
Louis Kahn
1965 · La Jolla, USA
A research campus framed around a single channel of water aimed at the Pacific horizon.
The empty travertine court and the angled study towers that catch the ocean light.
Louis Kahn
1972 · Fort Worth, USA
The definitive lesson in natural light — cycloid vaults that wash the galleries in silver daylight.
The slit at the crown of each vault and the reflector that turns harsh sun into soft light.
Jørn Utzon
1973 · Sydney, Australia
The shells that became a nation's emblem — and a saga of structural invention and cost.
How the roof shells were finally rationalised as segments of a single sphere.
Le Corbusier
1955 · Ronchamp, France
Corbusier's sculptural turn — a chapel of curved walls and deep, coloured light-wells.
The thick south wall with its scattered, splayed windows shaping the light.
Peter Zumthor
1996 · Vals, Switzerland
Architecture as atmosphere — local quartzite, water, steam and silence.
How the stacked stone, the temperature of each pool and the light make a sensory sequence.
Tadao Ando
1989 · Ibaraki, Japan
A cross of light cut into a concrete box — minimalism at its most charged.
The cruciform slot in the altar wall and Ando's flawless fair-faced concrete.
Frank Gehry
1997 · Bilbao, Spain
The titanium icon that coined the 'Bilbao effect' — architecture as urban regeneration.
How CATIA-modelled titanium curves wrap an orthogonal gallery sequence within.
Renzo Piano & Richard Rogers
1977 · Paris, France
The building turned inside-out — structure and services become the façade, freeing the floors.
The exposed, colour-coded services and the clear-span interior they make possible.
Mies van der Rohe & Philip Johnson
1958 · New York, USA
The bronze tower that set the grammar of the corporate high-rise — and gave the city a plaza.
The expressed bronze mullions and the generous setback plaza that frames it.
Antoni Gaudí
1882– (ongoing) · Barcelona, Spain
A cathedral grown from nature's geometry — catenary forms and tree-like structure.
The branching columns and hyperboloid vaults derived from hanging-chain models.
Kenzō Tange
1964 · Tokyo, Japan
A suspension-roof stadium for the Tokyo Olympics — engineering as soaring form.
How the cable-suspended roof spans the arena and shapes the sweeping silhouette.
Mies van der Rohe
1951 · Plano, USA
The glass box raised above a floodplain — the most distilled statement of 'less is more'.
The eight welded steel columns and the floating planes that touch the ground lightly.
Charles & Ray Eames
1949 · California, USA
A home built from off-the-shelf industrial parts — joyful, economical, endlessly studied.
How standard steel-frame catalogue components are composed into a warm dwelling.
Jørn Utzon
1976 · Copenhagen, Denmark
Frampton's exemplar of critical regionalism — a plain shed outside, billowing light within.
The undulating in-situ concrete ceiling that gathers and diffuses daylight.
Less is more.
— Mies van der Rohe
God is in the details.
— Mies van der Rohe
Form follows function.
— Louis Sullivan
Less is a bore.
— Robert Venturi
Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.
— Le Corbusier
We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.
— Winston Churchill
A room is not a room without natural light.
— Louis Kahn
Design for all the senses, not the eye alone — touch, sound and warmth make a place.
— after Juhani Pallasmaa
Root the work in its place: its climate, its light, its tectonics — resist placeless sameness.
— after Kenneth Frampton
In India, a courtyard is a climate device before it is a composition — it ventilates, shades and cools.
Orientation is free. A long E–W axis lets you shade the harsh west sun on the short faces.
Thermal mass with night-flush cooling suits hot-dry climates; shading with cross-ventilation suits warm-humid.
The plinth is not optional in India — it lifts the building clear of monsoon splash and termites.
Light a room from two sides: it removes glare and models the space evenly.
The section, not the plan, is where spatial drama lives. Draw it early.
A good detail sheds water before it decorates. Resolve the drip, the fall and the flashing first.
Circulation should be legible — one should know where one is, and where to go, without signage.
Honest materials age into patina; imitation finishes age into shabbiness.
Embodied carbon now rivals operational carbon — choosing a material is a climate decision.
A daylight factor around 2% is the working threshold for a well-lit habitable room.
Blondel's rule keeps a stair comfortable: 2 × riser + tread ≈ 600–640 mm.
The threshold — verandah, otla, foyer — mediates public and private. Design it deliberately, never by default.
Proportion still rewards study: the golden section and √2 rectangle underlie much that simply 'feels right'.
Cross-ventilation needs an inlet and an outlet in different pressure zones; one window barely ventilates a room.
Anthropometrics anchor comfort: a primary corridor wants ≥1.05–1.20 m; a stair tread ≥250 mm.
Architecture is frozen music.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.
— Frank Lloyd Wright
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication — strip a design until nothing more can be removed.
Build with shadow as much as light; in the Indian sun, shade is the most generous gift a plan can give.
Draw the human figure into every drawing — it is the only scale that finally matters.
