Praising the sum of the parts.

To see more photos check out the link here: India Art n Design – Home in the Wild

To see more photos check out the link here: India Art n Design – Home in the Wild

Thillai Nataraja Temple, Chidambaram

Since site cast concrete buildings can be engineered and built with primitive methods, hand labor and local materials, it is not surprising that social, economic and very real physical conditions have provided a home for Modern Architecture in virtually every tropical climate zone on the planet.  Also, mid century pioneering projects like Le Corbusier’s complex in Chandigarh, India;  Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer’s  Brasília;  and Lou Kahn’s National Assembly Buildings in Bangladesh, had the far reaching effect of validating modernist efforts in tropical locations until today, when it might even appear, to those of us who live in the world of tortured steel, glass, plastic, engineered wood and stone building, that time has stood still.

In India the case could be made that this is doubly true because of the national tendency to decorate all things modern with temple motifs.  We are left with a sense of parallel worlds, existing side by side but somehow never quite assimilating.  It is occurs here, to the bungalow in the photos, with actually quite pleasing results.  Maybe it is time we stop expecting the whole to materialize, and be happy with the sum of the parts.