Report on Wooden Architecture Collection of Gujarat at SADACC Trust, United Kingdom

This research project titled, “Wooden Architecture Collection of Gujarat at South Asian Decorative Arts and Crafts Collection (SADACC) Trust, United Kingdom” is primarily investigating the South Asian collection of the SADACC Trust. The Trust holds a unique collection of architectural and furniture pieces from India and Pakistan, which is the principal reference material for this project. The emphasis of this project is on interior architecture elements (like doors, windows, columns, etc.) of traditional houses of Gujarat, India. These traditional houses constitute a major part of the cultural repository, but yet they are most often neglected in academic literature. Typically, research has favoured royal collections or religious buildings, hence there is great lacunae in research on the everyday traditional and vernacular buildings. This investigation uses the book Naqsh: The Art of Wood Carving of Traditional Houses of Gujarat: Focus on Ornamentation (2004), and the research of the Design Innovation and Craft Resource Centre (DICRC) at CEPT University, which has a vast digital catalogue of traditional and vernacular buildings, interior architectural elements, furniture and objects from Gujarat (http://buildingcraftlab.dicrc.in/).

Details

Authors: Jay Thakkar
Date: 2016