Imagining Architects: Creativity in the Religious Monuments of India

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University of Delaware Press, 2000 - Architecture - 212 pages
"Imagining Architects explores the nature of visual inventions in the religious architecture of India using an analytical framework that gives makers of religious monuments a visibility commonly denied to them in the historiography of Indian art and architecture. The exploration is based on a series of unusual formal experiments documented in a group of stone temples built in the eleventh century in the Karnataka region of southern India. The author shows (in these experiments) a deliberate search for a new architectural principle, using textual evidence and inscriptions referring to architects. The author also demonstrates a self-conscious modernity of Karnataka's makers, who negotiated architectural traditions and religious ideas to radically change a previous architectural norm dominating the region."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
 

Contents

List of Figures
7
Preface and Acknowledgments
13
An Architectural Mule
19
Regional Theory in the Definition of Hybrid
31
Drifts in Southern Architecture
52
The Vesara Moment
77
Individuality and Agency in Vesara Architecture
100
The Geography of Vesara Architecture Karnataka in ca AD 1100
126
So What? The Expressive Content of Vesara
167
Conclusion Makers and Making of Indian Temple Architecture
188
Notes
191
Glossary of Sanskrit Terms
204
Bibliography
206
Index
210
Copyright

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Page 206 - Survey of Western India. Report of the First Season's Operations in the Belgam and Kaladgi Districts. January to May, 1874. Prepared at the India Museum and Published under the Authoiity of the Secretary of State for India in Council. By JAMES BURGESS, Author of the " Rock Temples of Elephanta," &c., &c., and Editor of
Page 207 - Pali, Sanskrit and Old Canarese Inscriptions from the Bombay Presidency and parts of the Madras Presidency and Mysore, and in the next year BL Rice published his Mysore Inscriptions.
Page 207 - Gravely, FH, and TN Ramachandran. "The Three Main Styles of Temple Architecture Recognized by the Silpa-Sastras.

About the author (2000)

Ajay Sinha currently teaches in the Art Department at Mount Holyoke College as Associate Professor.

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