One Continuous Line

 

Aditya Prakash belonged to the first generation of Indian modernists, a lodestar group of civil servants under Jawaharlal Nehru’s leadership immediately after Independence, at a time when the connectivity between city, citizen and nation seemed vibrant and expanding. Ignoring disciplinary boundaries, Prakash viewed all aspects of his work as multiple dimensions of a single quest — to understand the purpose of life, enjoy it, and to keep the interests of the poorest at heart. This is the “continuous line” and it represents an insight into Prakash’s philosophy in life and design.

Conceived as an introduction to his vast body of work, this volume is an illustrated narrative, with a series of interspersed visual essays. The book traces his education as an architect, his early modernist works, his deep artistic impulses and his efforts to rally a culture of academic inquiry in the face of political stagnation and apathy. It documents early successes and later frustrations of his life as an architect and academic, and his arguments against the turn to postmodernism in Indian architecture of the early 1980s. The book also provides an interpretive and personal narrative of Prakash’s life and legacy, in order to encourage others to engage with this visionary architect’s oeuvre.

 

Vikramaditya Prakash, an authority on modernism and Indian architecture, teaches at the University of Washington, Seattle, and is the Director of the Chandigarh Urban Lab. He is the author of several books, most recently The Architecture of Shivdatt Sharma (Mapin, 2012), part of the Modernism in India Series, and a contributor to Le Corbusier: Chandigarh and the Modern City (Mapin, 2009) and Chandigarh Revealed: Le Corbusier’s City Today (Mapin, 2017), among others.

 

Specifications

Size : 10 x 11” (254 x 280 mm)
Extent: 292 pp

337 colour photographs

59 black and white drawings and photographs

 

Materials and Printing
a. Text: 4c x 4c on 170 gsm Lumi Silk
b. Ends: 4c x 1c on 130gsm Nymolla multifine woodfree
c. Case: 0c + Foil stamping on spine x 0c on coloured wibalin buckram
d. Jacket: 4c + Matte Laminate x 0c on 170 gsm gloss art 

Binding: Thread sewn, ends pasted down, Square backed, H/T bands. ASF reinforced on spine, cased and individually shrink-wrapped.