Punjabi Baroque and other memoirs of Architecture

By Gautam Bhatia

Punjabi Baroque describes a peculiar middle class condition that reduces domestic building to an unusually vagabond form of visual ambiguity. In the search for a relevant expression, the private house in the 1980s sought to smear the fa ade with the new and the dysfunctional, the irrelevant and the unintentional, the despairing and the devious - all in the hope that that it would present a lively discourse to the cityscape. It did. It was the result of a middle class vanity that explored the new architectural frontier of excess money, foreign travel, plagiarised design journals, and personal recollections of architecture into an entirely new and untested medium. The private home was - as described by artist Claes Oldenburg - an art that takes its lines from the lines of life itself, that drips and spits, and fluffs and extends, and is coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself. The house therefore was an intimate autobiography of the owner, the architect and the builder. Gautam Bhatia's formal training is of an architect and artist. Over the course of three decades of practice in Delhi, and early work experience on a variety of projects in the US, he is firmly established as one of the country's foremost architects, building a range of residential, institutional, recreational, hospitality and heritage projects-including schools, housing, spas, and private homes. He has also received several awards for his drawings and buildings and has written extensively on architecture. Besides a biography on Laurie Baker, he is the author of Punjabi Baroque, Silent Spaces and Malaria Dreams and several other books. Bhatia has participated in a number of one-man and group shows in India and abroad. He is currently working on Future Building-an exhibition of ideas for the future city.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GPZ4N82C
• ISBN13: 9788198353078
• Release Date: January 2025
• Publisher: Architexturez Imprints
• Length: 282 Pages
• Weight: 0.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.9"