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Modern with historic touches This is the third in a series of reports from a three week study trip to Kerala and Tamil Nadu in southern India The tour of the Chettinad houses began with chai in a modern home, so new that the final coat of paint had still to be applied. Mutthaiah Kathiresan (or short: KT) stands proudly among the colorful walls of the house he had designed for his parents. This is the first Indian house our travel group sets foot in,  not counting the apartment building in which we reside for our stay in Kozhikode, Kerala. We, that is a group of architecture students from Morgan State University in Baltimore, their professor and I. We had taken the trip from Tanjavur in Tamil Nadu to Karaikudi to see the houses of the Chettinar. After leaving our shoes in the yet to be tiled front entry area we are welcomed with coffee, tea and warm water.  Like many new homes in southern India, this new structure is modernist in a way that reminds of the Bauhaus but could also have b

This article is second in a series of reports from a three week trip through Kerala and Tamil Nadu in Southern India.  Some say, that you either love or hate India the moment you step out of the plane. Equally the announcement of a trip to India is met with disbelief ("why India?"), horror stories ("all my friends who traveled there had terrible diarrhea"), and occasional enthusiasm ("India will change you, if you let it, and you will come back as a better being"). Indian and US architecture students collaborating on urban research in India Out of stories about India over the years formed an amalgam that is worse than absolute ignorance: A thicket of bias, half information and news accumulated over a lifetime can easily give the impression of knowledge when it is far from it. Most Americans haven't been in India and don't really care to know much about the far away place. I was one of those who didn't see a particular need to change whatever id

The following is the first in a series of reports from a three week exploration of Southern India The alley is so narrow, bumpy and mostly unpaved that our schoolbus couldn't turn into it and dropped us off at the main road which was small enough as well. We find ourselves in the Kerala village of Beypore  at that point   not knowing, that the village had a centuries-old tradition of crafting sturdy ships and dhows from teak wood of the local forests for the trade across the Arabian Sea. So our small group of architecture students was confused when when the alley open up to a steel scaffold that held up a blue tarp under which a huge wooden boat sat jacked up on various pieces of lumber and rollers held in place by braces. What really happened here became clearer in bits and pieces that the western mind had trouble comprehending. So many ironies, so many contradictions in one spot. The boatyard in Beypore If the boat looked like out of some fantasy world, it is because that is prec