Imagining Architects

Imagining Architects explores the nature of visual inventions in the religious architecture of India using an analytical framework that gives makers of religious monuments a visibility commonly denied to them in the historiography of Indian art and architecture. The exploration is based on a series of unusual formal experiments documented in a group of stone temples built in the eleventh century in the Karnataka region of southern India. The author shows (in these experiments) a deliberate search for a new architectural principle, using textual evidence and inscriptions referring to architects.

The author also demonstrates a self-conscious modernity of Karnataka's makers, who negotiated architectural traditions and religious ideas to radically change a previous architectural norm dominating the region.