Mewar Complex

Rajsamand District, India

Photo © Ariel Huber

Architects: Arya Architects

Year: 2008

The Mewar complex near Udaipur is a series of memorial and tourism facilities built to commemorate the life of Rana Pratap, the legendary king of Rajasthan. Most of his time being spent in jungles, on battlefields, he did not have a legacy of buildings like palaces, havelis, etc. His was a life of frugality, hardships, and also full of strengths. The brief of the government was to make battle scenes, chattris, walls with crenellations, in line with the traditional architecture. We, obviously, had other ideas. It took a lot of persuasion, to convince the authorities that these buildings should resonate the context and the life of the Maharana rather than some fixed imagery. The projects were about the landscape, the tension between the bringing the landscape into the buildings and taking the buildings out. They were about crafting the architecture out of local materials, raw textures, into the landscape, marking a point and then leaving it to the forces of nature.