Publication

  • One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash
    Vikramaditya Prakash
    Author
    Mapin Publishing, 2020
  • GRANTEE
    Vikramaditya Prakash
    GRANT YEAR
    2018

Aditya Prakash, Study Drawing of Sustainable Linear City. Pencil and Ink on tracing paper, ca.1988, Chandigarh, India. © The Aditya Prakash Foundation, Chandigarh.

One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash documents and contextualizes the work of one of the most prolific of the first generation of Indian modernists. Prakash was an architect, an urban planner, a painter, sculptor, set-designer, furniture designer, academic, theatre director, and actor, as well as an occasional poet. The first publication devoted solely to Prakash's work, the objective of this book is to introduce scholarly and general audiences the diversity of his work, to locate it in terms of its local, national, and international contexts, and to build a narrative that describes the motivations of the work. The "continuous" in the title refers both to Prakash's fascination with the possibilities of generating form using a single line, and to his search for synergy between the various disciplines. The book focuses on Prakash's efforts to re-think Le Corbusian idea through Indic forms and imperatives.

Vikramaditya Prakash is a professor of architecture at the University of Washington in Seattle, with adjunct appointments in landscape architecture, urban design and planning. He has a BArch from Panjab University, India and MA and PhD in history and theory of architecture from Cornell University. His books include Chandigarh's Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India (University of Washington Press, 2001), A Global History of Architecture (with Francis DK Ching & Mark Jarzombek, John Wiley, 2017), Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon (with Peter Scriver, coeditor, Routledge, 2007), The Architecture of Shivdatt Sharma (Mapin Publishing, 2013), and Chandigarh: An Architectural Guide (Altrim, 2017). He has served as chair and associate dean and is co-principal investigator (with Mark M. Jarzombek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) of the Mellon Foundation ($2.5 million) funded Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC).