#memory
Eduard Lutyens.
29 March is the birth anniversary of Sir Eduard Lutyens (1869-1941).
British Architect Sir Edwin Lutyens designed New Delhi, the new imperial capital for the colonial British in India, in the early 20th century. He started his career designing country homes in England.
A memorial to Lutyens was erected by sculptor Stephen Cox in 2015 in London. It is titled ‘Figure Emerging’ and was inspired by the carvings of gods in the cave temples of Mamallapuram, India. It was made with the help of temple-sculptors from Mamallapuram and the basalt stoned were quarried from near Kanchipuram.
Edwin Lutyens is known to Indians as the architect who built the grand, new administrative capital of New Delhi for the British, when they shifted the imperial capital out of Calcutta. Built between 1912 and 1929, the new city was inaugurated in 1931. ‘Lutyens’ Delhi’ was the heart of the new colonial capital – the Viceroy’s House (now Rashtrapati Bhavan) was its architectural centerpiece. The administrative heart of India, it includes the Secretariat buildings called North Block and South Block, Parliament House and the Lutyens Bungalow Zone.
Lutyens invented the ‘Delhi Order’ when he built New Delhi. It was Indo-Classical fusion architecture that blended European and Indian elements, such as jaalis, temple bells, chhatris and Indian motifs. Lutyens used the Delhi Order in many of his projects in England too.
Lutyen’s Delhi is undergoing a transformation with the construction of a new Parliament Building, new Administrative Block and the Prime Minister’s residence adjacent to the old buildings.
– Joy Kallivayalil.
https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-edwin-lutyens
