Christiane Gruber Mosque and grove, ancient wall and garden, palace and courtyard, are full of song, of the cheerful sound of twittering and chirping; everywhere there is the rush of wings, everywhere the busy, active little lives go on.[1]—Edmondo de Amicis (1878) In Istanbul and further afield, a number of…
Nicolas Roth Conjuring up a lavish display of fireworks and illumination in celebration of the Indian spring festival of Holi, the Urdu poet Sa‘ādat Yār Khān ‘Rangīn’ (1757-1835) wrote the following in 1798: Lab-i daryā pah balliyon ko gāṛ Bāndhe ṭhāṭhar unhon ne jaise pahāṛ Bāns un men karoṛhā hī…
Zirwat Chowdhury Contemporaries of the architect George Dance the Younger had little doubt that his new façade (built 1788-1790) for the City of London’s Guildhall (Fig. 1) made some form of reference to the artist Williams Hodges’s recently published views of Indian architecture (Fig. 2). As the City’s Clerk of…
Carolyn Yerkes A revolutionary referent opens the second architectural book published in the American colonies, a new edition of Abraham Swan’s A Collection of Designs in Architecture, Containing New Plans and Elevations of Houses, for General Use, published in Philadelphia in 1775 (Fig. 1). A central column or pillar, gripped…
Heeryoon Shin Overlooking the sacred Ganges River, the Amethi Temple blends seamlessly into the riverfront vista of Banaras, the celebrated north Indian Hindu pilgrimage city (Fig. 1). Its curvilinear towers mark the building as a Hindu temple following a longstanding architectural tradition, a choice befitting the temple’s location in a…