Brick Architecture Craft in Nineteenth Century South India: Reading Buildings as Archives

This book explores brick architecture of the nineteenth century in South India, through the lens of tectonics and materiality. The book is a diachronically elaborated history of brick architecture, especially analysing the hybridity due to the indigenous and colonial intersections of 19th century India. It offers a decolonial reading of architecture through meticulous measured drawings as a tool, and presents an argument for reading buildings as archives.

South-India has thousands of dilapidated buildings, which may be erased due to neglect, laxed laws and ignorance. The book exposes the tectonics, fixing, material choices, socio-political circumstances and more. This method of analysing the dilapidated buildings as an archive of construction, forefronts the ’makers’ and the agency of the local craftspeople rather than an Anglo centric gaze. Brick buildings such as the extravagantly ornamental and structurally rich Chatrams of Thanjavur, Rosary Church, Hassan and Fort School, Bengaluru are some of the many cases elaborated in the book. The book connects the history of brick to its many contemporary challenges and manifestations.

The book is intended for students and scholars of architecture, history, material-culture, colonial studies and the Global South as well as anyone interested in brick as material for architecture.

Priya Joseph teaches at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, MAHE, Bengaluru, India and is an architect by training. Her work transects architectural history, urban ecologies, art and design in the urban, material culture. She has published widely on architecture, and materiality, including Terracotta People (2024) and Rupturing Terracotta: Entangled Exchanges of the Hand and the Machine in South India (2022).