Little is known of the cultures that produced such prehistoric Indian cities as Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, which flourished along the banks of the Indus from the 3rd millennium BCE. Laid out on a grid oriented to the cardinal directions, these settlements’ advanced refinements—raised citadels on stepped terraces, sewers, running water for domestic use and large ritual baths—rival those of Sumerian cities of the time, though they are oddly lacking in large royal tombs or religious buildings. In general however, the architectural traditions of the Indian subcontinent—and indeed its surviving monuments—are largely religious in nature, focused on great temple complexes. Architectural style varied according to successive ruling regimes, who dictated the favoured religious system. Four major epochs can be discerned. The most ancient Indian culture, the forerunner of modern Hinduism, is sometimes termed Indo-Aryan, and lasted from about 1500 BCE until about 1200 CE. In the 3rd century BCE the great ruler Asoka imported skilled artisans from Persia to initiate a tradition of skilled stone carving. This period also saw the creation of the first Buddhist monuments, a religion that arose in the 6th century. Substantial Buddhist stupas (gated and domed mounds, serving as centres of pilgrimage), chatiyas (temples) and viharas (monasteries) can be found in southern India, and—as at Ajanta—often utilise natural caves or are cut into rock hillsides. The Kailasa Temple at Ellora (750 CE), devoted to Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, is part of a great complex of rock-cut architecture at the site. Excavated out of a 2-km stretch of basalt cliff, it was begun by vertical excavation: carvers cut down through the living rock, removing some 200,000 tons of material to create a complex monolithic structure featuring tall monuments and multi-storied buildings with highly ornate wall carvings.
From the 7th century the Brahman culture erected monumental, free-standing temples, many of which still survive. Though varying by region, Hindu temples generally take the form of a walled compound enclosing a tall vimana (shrine), a hall of columns and lesser buildings. They are notable for their very rich, indeed overwhelming, profusion of decorative and representational carving, sometimes exhibiting erotic forms. (This relates largely to a Tantric belief that sexual activity can represent an ecstatic union of the human and the divine realms.) The Kandariya Mahadeva temple at the royal city of Khajuraho (c. 1050), for example, was lavishly funded and ornamented. Set on a tall plinth, it features a mountain-like arrangement of multiple towers positioned in successive order of height. Its upper levels are encrusted with densely-packed relief carvings.
India’s second major period of architecture, which lasted from the 12th through the 18th centuries, was precipitated by the arrival of Islamic invaders from Afghanistan, who established a new capital at Delhi. While politically turbulent, this era witnessed a boom in monumental construction, especially with the rise of the Mughal dynasty from the 16th century. The Muslims introduced several new building types to India from the Middle East, notably the mosque with its vast prayer hall and minarets. Indian mosques consequently betray strong influence from Persian prototypes, and are notable for the increasing refinement of their masonry and decorative stone carving. This trend is most famously represented by the funerary complex known as the Taj Mahal at Agra (c. 1630-1653), though technically this is not a mosque. At the same time, the Muslims launched an extensive and long-lived campaign to convert or destroy all Hindu temples, with the result that the north of India is largely devoid of such structures, except in the remotest regions. The third and fourth major periods of Indian architecture, as discussed below, began with the British Raj, and saw widespread importation of Western styles and typologies into the subcontinent.
Moving further east, we see that Hinduism and Buddhism soon reached more southerly parts of Asia, including Burma, Indonesia and Indo-China, producing extraordinary temple complexes of unprecedented form and scale. The great 9th-century shrine at Borobodur, Indonesia, for example, is the largest Buddhist temple in the world. Its huge, symmetrical plan is oriented to the cardinal directions, while its profile consists of a series of superimposed terraces that symbolically represents the successive stages of enlightenment of a Buddhist pilgrim. Another great temple, the 12th-century complex of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, again manifests a seemingly endless sequence of platforms, galleries, porches and towers, and is representative of the achievements of the Khmer civilisation.
Chinese civilisation arose along the valley of the Yellow River in the 2nd millennium BCE. Monumental architecture first began to appear in the 3rd century BCE under the Ch’ing dynasty, which united the country for the first time. Its greatest built legacy of this period is, of course, the Great Wall, which guards the northern border of the kingdom, though in the centuries since it has been rebuilt many times. In later periods Chinese cities were among the most advanced in the world. Yet little Chinese architecture dating from before the Ming period (1368-1644) survives. This is largely because most honorific buildings above the level of the stone foundations were constructed of pine or cedar wood, which has since decomposed. Stone vaulting was generally reserved for tomb structures or, later, city walls and gateways. Pagodas provide occasional exceptions: the Great Wild Goose Pagoda, for example, a very tall building erected during the Tang Dynasty (in the 7th century) as part of a monastery, was first built of rammed earth with a stone facing and later rebuilt in brick.
It was nevertheless China’s innovations in timber construction that proved most influential throughout Asia, and its traditions changed little over the centuries. Simple trabeated constructions in wood can be found as early as prehistoric times in China, and it might be said that the column (rather than the solid wall) remained the basic unit of building over the centuries. Timber was nevertheless scarce in the central part of the country, and early wooden structures made use of relatively thin columns, wide bays and walls of light infill. Most Chinese utilitarian structures—houses, fortifications and military structures—were built of rammed earth or brick, while wood was used largely for honorific buildings. The repetitive bays of this framed wooden architecture necessarily relied on a simple modular grid system, and a set of standard proportions came to be codified for Imperial use in Li Chieh’s Sung-era treatise Methods and Designs in Architecture (1103). The characteristic curving roof of the Chinese temple, with its wide eaves, terracotta tiling and increasingly complex systems of bracketing, became the focus of carpentry skill and decorative attention. A characteristic example might be the Temple of Heaven in Beijing (1406-1420 and later), whose circular superstructures of timber rest on a tall marble base. Chinese palaces were generally of one storey, and like temples, were rarely freestanding but incorporated into larger compounds of buildings and courtyards. Here one must look at the 15th-century Forbidden City in Beijing, a succession of vast halls and courtyards linked by marble balustrades. This was for almost five centuries the residence of the Chinese emperors. Based on a strict axial symmetry, its plan takes the form of a vast rectangle surrounded by a wide moat and a high wall. Its numberless buildings offer some of the best examples of Chinese palatial architecture, and it now constitutes the largest collection of ancient wooden structures in the world. Entering from Tiananmen Square, foreign ambassadors would have to pass through an intimidating sequence of huge gates and courts before arriving at the Hall of Supreme Harmony; this served as an audience hall for the emperor who received visitors while sitting on a tall dais.
Buddhist temples in China tended to follow the lead of Han dynasty palaces, but introduced a new architectural form of Indian origin: the pagoda. (Extensive underground sanctuaries also follow Indian precedent.) The oldest extant Chinese example dates from the 6th century, and—as noted above—tall and impressive structures in wood and brick from the Tang dynasty (618-906) and later are among China’s oldest surviving monuments. Starting from a square or hexagonal base, the pagoda is formed of superimposed stories of diminishing width with decorative treatment of bracketing and roofs. Elaborate and colourful pagodas of this type continued to be built through the 19th century.
Some of Japan’s oldest architectural monuments are its great Shinto shrines, notably those at Ise and Isumo. Chinese building practises, particularly the knowledge of timber construction, were carried with Buddhist missionaries to Korea and Japan in the 6th century. Many of the early temples at the capital city of Nara reflect such Chinese influence, and the complex at Horyu-ji is one of the oldest. The capital moved to Kyoto in 794, and the city is full of temples erected due to the patronage of the Emperor and his court. Among the other antiquities of Japan are the so-called ‘keyhole tombs,’ or tumuli (kofun), the most notable of which is that of the Emperor Nintoku (5th century). Located near Osaka, this monumental burial mound is 486 metres long and 35 metres high, consisting of a keyhole-shaped island in which one end is round and the other trapezoidal. Equally impressive is the later Japanese tradition of feudal castle construction, which was precipitated by the turbulent political situation of the 16th century: at Osaka, Himeji and other locations, tall multi-gabled towers set atop moated stone foundations dominate the landscape.
The linked rise of imperialism and industrialism radically altered the architectures of Asia and Australasia, largely supplanting native traditions with Western styles and techniques. In India the British Raj of 1858-1947 saw the importation of European traditions for churches, railway stations and the offices and homes of colonial administrators in Madras, Calcutta and elsewhere. Towards the end of this period we need only look at the monumental governmental complex at New Delhi, designed by Sir Herbert Baker and Sir Edwin Lutyens in a Classical style inflected by Mughal traditions, to see the imperial machine in operation. A new period of Indian architecture opens up with independence and nationhood for India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, one that has witnessed attempts to come to terms both with the technical and aesthetic innovations of Western modernism as well as such pressing social realities as overpopulation and poverty. Even after independence, however, India has tended to look to the West for inspiration, and in the 1950s and 1960s it was the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier who was chosen to design the new capital city of Chandigarh in the Punjab, and the American Louis Kahn who took charge of the government buildings of Dhaka, Bangladesh. In recent years, Indian architects such as Charles Correa and Balkrishna Doshi, though clearly influenced by their Western mentors, have worked to generate an appropriately hybrid modernism for their native country, one that can reflect both new approaches and traditional regional concerns.
With the exception of a brief incursion of the Italian Baroque through Jesuit influence in the early 18th century, China remained closed to foreign architectural trends until the early 20th century. Contrary to what happened in Japan, a subsequent period of hybrid Western-Asian building later gave way to an implicit adoption of modernist principles, and in recent years the opening of Chinese markets to the West has led to an extraordinary boom in highrise architecture in Beijing and other economic zones. Japan, after its opening to the West in the mid-19th century, has gradually assumed its position in the forefront of contemporary architecture. Foremost among 20th century Japanese architects was Kenzo Tange, who began his career by designing the Peace Centre in Hiroshima. Tange’s primary influence—as was that of his teacher Kunio Maekawa (who worked in the master’s Paris atelier) and many other later Japanese architects, including Tadao Ando—is that of Le Corbusier. Following Le Corbusier’s Brutalist deployment of raw concrete in bold and striking forms, Japan continues to set the world benchmark of skilful and elegant concrete construction. Towards the end of the 20th century, the increasingly futuristic approach of some Japanese architects led to a kind of modernist ‘Baroque’ that has produced formally complex and expressive results.
A typically forward-looking monument of the present era in Asian architecture is represented by C.Y. Lee and Partners’ Taipei 101 tower in Taiwan (1999-2004), a centre for international finance. Its 101 stories embody a fusion of Western technology and modernist aesthetics with Asian economic might and traditional iconography. Innovative engineering—including a huge steel pendulum suspended between the 92nd to the 88th floors as a giant tuned mass damper to offset deflection of the building in high winds—makes it an extremely stable structure, able to withstand earthquakes and typhoons. At the same time, an elaborate cosmological and numerological symbolism has been claimed for the tower, and the repeated segmentation of its envelope suggests a pagoda form.
Over millennia the indigenous peoples of Australia and the South Sea islands developed timeless building traditions suited to local ecological conditions that nevertheless did not match Western expectations of what formal architecture should look like; their cultural productions were largely ignored by the first Western colonists. The first Western-style monumental architecture in Australia, dating from the early 19th century, evinced a late version of English Georgian Classicism when it aspired to formal elegance. Much building was necessarily utilitarian in character, though military and penal constructions could nevertheless assume a severe grandeur, and ornamental ironwork, as applied to balconies, came to characterise more upscale domestic architecture. Fuelled by the wealth generated by the Gold Rush, Australian cities soon came to display impressive examples of High Victorian-style architecture based on contemporary British modes and models. Foreign influence remained decisive through much of the 20th century, whether in the new capital city of Canberra (designed by Walter Burley Griffin, a onetime partner of Frank Lloyd Wright), or the famous Sydney Opera House (by the Danish architect Jørn Utzon, finished by others). Of native Australian architects, the late Harry Seidler remains the most prominent, though the buildings of Glenn Murcutt have recently aroused global interest among architectural professionals for their sensitive response to site and climate.