About Book
The book is about vastuvidya or architectural theory, the creation of temples, and the role of drawings as an indispensible bridge between the two. It focuses on two worlds attributed to Bhoja, the legendary Paramara rule of Malwa in the first half of the eleventh century. The first of these is his vastly ambitious, but unfinished, royal temple at Bhojpur with its unique set of architectural drawings engraved in the surrounding rocks. These beautiful drawings, documented here for the first time, provide insights into construction processes and glimpses of hitherto unknown temple forms. They also hold the key to the intended design of the Bhojpur temple itself, which would have been by far the biggest Hindu temple in the world.
About Author
Adam Hardy, an architect, is Professor of Asian Architecture at The Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. He has been studying Indian temples for more than thirty years and his publications on the subject include Indian Temple Architecture: Form and Trans-formation (IGNCA, 1995) and The Temple Architecture of India (Wiley, 2007). Since 1999 he has been Editor of the journal South Asian Studies.He is currently working on two projects which, like the study for this book but in different ways, re-create traditional temples.