This is an invaluable book for those who want to understand the geography of their cities, as well as for students of Indian architecture. In lucid language that speaks to laymen and architects alike, Jon Lang provides a history of Indian architecture in the twentieth century. He analyses its tangled developments from the founding of the Indian Institute of Architects during the 1920s to the present diversity of architectural directions. He describes the often contradictory tugs of the international and the local as he reviews architects’ efforts to be up-to-date in their work.

Lang examines the early influences on Indian architecture both of movements like the Bauhaus as well as prominent individuals like Habib Rehman, Jawaharlal Nehru, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. He looks at monuments, museums, resettlement colonies, housing, offices and movie halls all over India in his wide-ranging survey. Over 150 photographs and line drawings explain and illustrate concepts outlined in the text.

Jon Lang is Professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia where he served as the Head of the School of Architecture during the 1990s. Earlier, in the 1980s he was Director of the Urban Design Program at the University of Pennsylvania where he taught from 1970 to 1990.

Professor Lang was born in Calcutta and educated there, as well as in South Africa and the United States. He has served as a UNESCO consultant in Turkey and a NATO Fellow in Belgium. As a Ford Foundation Fellow he has taught at The Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur. He has worked professionally as an architect, urban designer and educator in both North and South America, in Europe and in Asia.

Jon Lang is co-author with Madhavi Desai and Miki Desai of Architecture and Independence: The Search for Identity (1997). He is also the author of Creating Architectural Theory(1987) and Urban Design: the American Experience (1994).