NowDelhi

Architecture

Architecture in Delhi

Delhi is a sequence of capitals built next to each other rather than on top, from the Sultanate to the Mughals to the British and then the republic. Each one chose a new site, which is why the older ones survive.

• British Council

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  Completed 1992

  Charles Correa

  The British Council headquarters on Kasturba Gandhi Marg, arranged as a sequence of courtyards from the street inward. Correa organised the route around three symbols in order, the banyan tree, the spiral of Bindu and the age of reason, so the plan is a walk through a history rather than a corridor. Howard Hodgkin's banyan mural covers the front in white Makrana marble and black Cuddapah stone, a technique from Mughal inlay. It is a foreign institution that spends its facade on an Indian image.

• Lotus Temple

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  Completed 1986

  Fariborz Sahba

  A Baháʼí house of worship in the south of the city, built as twenty-seven marble petals in nine clusters of three. Sahba set the geometry out as intersecting spheres and cones so the concrete shells could be cast with straight-line formwork, then faced them in white Greek marble. Nine doors open into one hall with no altar, no pulpit and no images, since the faith prohibits sermons. A building shaped this specifically is usually a monument; this one is a room for silence.

• Asian Games Village

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  Completed 1982

  Raj Rewal

  Housing for the 1982 Asian Games, converted to private flats afterward, near the Siri Fort. Rewal built seven hundred dwellings at low rise and high density in clusters of sixteen to thirty-six, each around a courtyard, linked by pedestrian lanes too tight for cars and shaded most of the day. The model was the mohalla and the old towns of Rajasthan rather than the slab block. It makes the argument that a dense city can be built without towers, at full scale.

• Rashtrapati Bhavan

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  Completed 1929

  Edwin Lutyens

  The viceroy's house on Raisina Hill, now the president's residence, built over seventeen years for the new imperial capital. Lutyens ran a classical plan and made the details Indian: a shallow dome from the Sanchi stupa, chhatris on the roofline, deep chajja cornices throwing a hard shadow across every elevation. He and Herbert Baker fell out over the approach gradient, which hides the building from the avenue as you climb toward it. It was finished eighteen years before the empire it represented ended.

• Humayun's Tomb

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  Completed 1572

  Mirak Mirza Ghiyas

  The tomb of the second Mughal emperor, commissioned by his widow Bega Begum in red sandstone and white marble. Mirak Mirza Ghiyas, brought from Persia, set the mausoleum at the centre of a walled charbagh divided by water channels, on a high plinth pierced with cells, under a double dome. It was the first garden tomb in the subcontinent. Every later Mughal mausoleum including the Taj Mahal develops this plan, which makes it the most consequential building in Delhi.