Some Resources on Indian Architecture

Archived from http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/george/.

The original page had a bunch of resources unrelated to Indian Architecture which I have deleted since those were NOT of interest to me.

All materials copyright Patrick George formerly at UPenn. That said, according to a note on the original website:

Patrick George's creative website regarding architecture in South Asia remains a useful and informative resource. Unfortunately, we have no idea where the author now is or how to make contact with him.

Introduction

As in the early stages of all architectural projects, the documents in this scaffold are currently under construction, if not also design. The following is a brief synopsis of their contents and conditions:

Indian architecture:
The lower level of the scaffold is devoted to Indian architecture in its various aspects, a subject that provides both the continually developing foundation for my own research in architectural history and theory, and a counterpoint to the western architecture above.

• sabha: Meetings Halls
  Due to a lack of archaeological evidence for these secular structures, they must be reconstructed from sculptural reliefs and textual sources. The images for this subject have been scanned but the html document is still under construction.
  
  
• vedi: Vedic Altars
  To a great extent, the information in this section of the scaffold has been extracted from chapter 2 of my dissertation, on the ritual foundations of Indian temple architecture.
  
  
• prasada: Indian temples
  This html document, currently under construction, is intended is intended to provide a general introduction to the topic of North Indian temple architecture. For more detail, particularly on temple construction, see my dissertation.
  
  
• yantra: Hindu Tantric Diagrams
  The information on yantras here primarily derives from a paper entitled "Illustrating Occluded Realms: Tantric Geometry and the Approximation of Perfection" that I presented for the topic "Tantra Occluded: The Unrecognized Role of Tantra in Asian Culture," held at the annual meeting of the Society for Tantric Studies, Menlo Park, California, May 28-31, 1992.
  
  
• mandala: Buddhist Tantric Diagrams
  This study of mandalas is based in part on a course in the construction of the five mandalas of the Vajrakilaya tradition that I attended at Namgyal Tantric College, Dharamsala, India, in 1991, and on observation of mandala construction by various groups of Buddhist monks in India and the United States.