India is the only country in the world with diverse climatic variations across her geography. And this climatic variation combined with locally available building materials had ensured for centuries, a variety of architectural styles and built forms unique to each region. Much of these built forms and their principles of planning, along with unique architectural detailing remains unexplored, undocumented and most of all, ignored by the modern architectural educational system, which has always derived inspiration from the Western philosophies and systems of design... as a result, even post colonial era of independence saw us getting colonised in the mind by the Western ideas, instead of looking at our backyard, crafts and people's strengths for design of built forms.

The result is that slowly we are losing our uniqueness...

There is so much to research upon in our country... while the number of architectural schools keep multipying every semester, precious little is done in each region to explore with pride, document and include the knowledge system in mainstream architectural education... the universities, schools or even the Council of Architecture pay only lip service to inclusion of our architectural heritage theories and construction studies in mainstream education... the result is that self appointed 'Vastu Pandits' are having a field day...

Here is the smallest state in India, Kerala and a glimpse into her regional architectural heritage...

Imitation has given rise to many unique structures that are inspired from Kerala's traditions...

At the same time there have been some unique individual efforts to contemporarise the principles of design...

 It is the climate that governs the uniqueness of  regional architecture...

If one climatic region of our country has so much to offer by way of knowledge, what about the remaining...

Images Copyright: 

Dr. Harimohan Pillai