Category: Uncategorized
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Kiyomizudera or the Pure Water Temple in Kyoto looks out to impressive views and brings forward the love of water manifested in architecture. Built with solid wooden logs in a visibly complex structure the temple is reached from the highest level and then descend downwards. The water collected on the roof of the temple is…
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UNESCO sites and World Heritage towns have a certain air about them that call for a completely divine experience and when coupled with one of the older religions in the world the effect is sublime. Nara located in the Kansai region of Japan is one such place. The small town of Nara attracts a…
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American architects have a great love for the Japanese sensitivity to design and architecture in general. Or let me rephrase, architects have a great respect for the Japanese sense of building and quite rightly so. From the mid-80s architects have thronged to Japan to study Tokyo and in general visit the country that is magnificently…
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Todai-ji was once the one of the powerful Seven Great Temples houses the great bronze Buddha, the largest Buddha statue in the world, of Vairocana, even today it serves as the Japanese headquarters of the Kegon school of Buddhism. It is a place where tourists and the famous deer of Nara roam together in one…
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Off the fashionable city of Kobe, a train-ride away is the Heron-like coloured in white Himeji Castle, perched on a hill likened to a white egret against the backdrop of the blue sky. Its remarkable history also holds tales of how it was covered in black during the Second World War to prevent it from…
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“Hi, am Zen”, she said. And she went on to be my bestest friend in the island country. She named herself she said, mainly to remind herself of the philosophy of lightness. Though largely believed to be Japanese, the Zen way of thinking finds its roots in the Mahayana Buddhism that originated in China during…
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Dotted by torii or the effervescent orange gateways, the Fushimi-Inari is the head shrine of Inari located in Kyoto. Inari, a patron of business, merchants and traders was widely revered by businessmen who donated the torans or gates in patronage. Coloured in black and a bright orange, and framing the way up to the shrine,…
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Inspired by a fictitious tale titled, “The Tale of Peach Blossom Spring”, a very popular Chinese folktale, legendary architect I M Pei designed the Miho Museum to the South-east of Kyoto, near the town of Shigaraki in Shika prefecture. In one of the rare cases of architecture seeking inspiration from a literary piece, the museum architect…
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Tadao Ando is a poet and his renditions in concrete are simply but frozen musical wonders, adhering to the proverb of architecture being frozen music. The pilgrimage to works of Tadao Ando or Ando-san as he is respectfully addressed is an inspiring one. His attention to detail, love for concrete and purity of massing make…
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Suddenly at a noted monumental structure I watched a woman click away incessantly at something that caught her fancy and I thought, all those pictures, first on her phone, then her system, then instagram and then all over social media, all that information, well something I would do too. Quite normally, this incessant desire to…
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The capital of Japan and home to over 30 million people, Greater Tokyo is a mega-metropolis, one steeped in history and doused with a salubrious dose of technology like little else. It also is unapologetically and brilliantly, Asia, thereby making it a cauldron of values, that are specific to the eastern part of the world.…
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There is no better way to learn than at the Smithsonian! From art to flight, from the natural world to the science fiction aiming at the future, the Smithsonian group of museums in Central DC are every bit informative as they are fascinating. Lined up along the axis from the Capitol Hill to the Lincoln…
Vedasri Siddamsetty 