In the winter of January 1954, an exhibition on low-cost housing opened in New Delhi—the capital of a country that had been independent from colonial rule for less than six years. Sprawling in the shadow of a sixteenth-century Mughal monument and organized by the United Nations, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Indian government, the exhibition was planned in spirit and form by the South African–born British town planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt. American architect Joseph Stein designed a model home for the exhibition: a spartan low-cost dwelling constructed with rammed earth and featuring bamboo blinds. While discussion of that exhibition makes up only one part of Farhan Karim's clever new book, it accurately captures the dizzying cast of global actors, disparate architectural methods and ideologies, and various experiments in housing design that aimed to alleviate poverty in independent India. Karim synthesizes evidence from an impressive range of sources (including...
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December 2020
Book Review|
December 01 2020
Review: Of Greater Dignity Than Riches: Austerity and Housing Design in India, by Farhan Karim
Farhan Karim
Of Greater Dignity Than Riches: Austerity and Housing Design in India
Pittsburgh
: University of Pittsburgh Press
, 2019
, 322 pp., 84 b/w illus. $55 (cloth), ISBN 9780822965695
Mrinalini Rajagopalan
Mrinalini Rajagopalan
University of Pittsburgh
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Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2020) 79 (4): 484–485.
Citation
Mrinalini Rajagopalan; Review: Of Greater Dignity Than Riches: Austerity and Housing Design in India, by Farhan Karim. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 December 2020; 79 (4): 484–485. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2020.79.4.484
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