Jawahar Kala Kendra

Jaipur was laid out in the eighteenth century on a nine-square Vedic mandala, with one square displaced where the hills forced it. Correa built his arts centre on the same diagram at a hundredth of the scale, and displaced the same square — pivoted it out of the grid to make the entrance, so the plan of the city and the plan of the building explain each other. Each of the nine squares takes one of the navagraha, the nine planets, and each is walled to eight metres so that the visitor moves between roofless rooms rather than through a corridor; the planetary signs are inlaid in white marble and granite on the red sandstone outside. The vocabulary is deliberately unplaced between eras — jharokha-like boxes cantilevered off blank rendered walls, jali screens, oculi punched at random heights. Designed in 1986 and ready in 1992.