Category: History
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Lucknow, India: A City With a Glorious Past
The royal family of Oudh (1722-1858) were the historically-rich and powerful rulers of their north-Indian state. The Nawabs of Oudh were generous patrons of art, poetry and music. Their royal treasury paid stipends and pensions to dancers, musicians and poets. Public poetry readings were held at the expense of nawabs, where poets from all over the India were invited. These free poetry readings…
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Architecture of Love and Death (part II)
This is the second, and last post, of Architecture of Love and Death. In the first post, I proposed that Egyptian pyramids were built in preparation of Death for their nobility, while Muslim mausoleums such as the Taj Mahal were built by family members out of love and devotion for the deceased. Islamic orthodoxy frowns upon building permanent structures over graves, fearing…
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Architecture of Love and Death (Part I)
This post is about funerary architecture of two different people in different times and places, ancient Egyptians and Muslim Mughals in India. Both of these people built great pieces of architecture to their dead. In Part 1 I will focus on the religious thought or absence of it behind these great pieces of architecture, i.e. Pyramids and Taj Mahal. I believe the former…
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Architecture of Death
While New Orleans is probably the best known city for its cemeteries, New York has some really lovely ones. A magnet for history buffs and bird watchers, Green-Wood is a Revolutionary War historic site (the Battle of Long Island was fought in 1776 across what is now its grounds), a designated site on the…
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60 Mies van der Rohe Haus
This was my first visit to Berlin, and I was thinking about Bauhaus and Mies. Inevitably, the next morning I decided to visit Mies’s Lemke House at the outskirts of Berlin. I arrived there after a U-Bahn ride and a bus connection and was surprised how unassuming and humble that house looked from the street. But when you enter the…
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Historic Delhi
The following is an excerpt from H. K. Kaul’s Historic Delhi, An anthology published by Oxford University Press, 1985. http://designscene.wordpress.com/2008/11/12/old-photos-of-india/ The city is known to be more than 3,000 years old. Around 1450 B.C. a forested area on the right bank of River Yamuna was chosen as the site of Indraprastha by a Pandava king mentioned in Mahabharata. It is…