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In mid-nineteenth-century Europe, at the height of the industrial revolution, the study of Asian societies and their architectures might well have been regarded, at best, as an arcane distraction from the pressing issues of the day. Yet, it was Karl Marx's interrogation-from the purview of his reader's desk in the British Library-of the exploits of capital in Europe's far-flung colonial empires and what he called the "Asiatic mode of Production" on which his seminal critique of the political economy of the modern world would be grounded. Within the domains of architectural and cultural theory, the scholarly tactics of Marx's contemporary, James Fergusson, were comparably oblique, but the critical and theoretical objectives were no less ambitious. It was Fergusson's concerted focus on "Indian and Eastern architecture" that would underpin one of the first and arguably still one of the most influential efforts of all time to frame a global history and theory of architecture. 1 Methodically sustained over half a century and half a world of distance, Fergusson's pioneering scholarship on Indian architecture in particular was sharpened and deepened, he believed, through the analytical acuity of the new photographic media of his age. The close-reading that these tools enabled of what he called the "stone book" of India's pre-modern architectural heritage revealed what he believed were the "true principles of architectural art." These were the principles by which he believed the architecture of modern (i.e. post Renaissance) Europe needed to be restored to the path of rational and authentic development and thereby saved from what he, among other contemporaries, regarded as its critically enfeebled state of revivalist mimicry. 2 THE CRITICAL TURN Of course, Fergusson and Marx were products of the ideas and the prejudices of their age, even as they sought to overturn received thinking. Inflected with the conventional racism of the day, Fergusson's theories were premised on notions of cultural difference and purity Architectural Theory Review 22, no. 3 (2018): 301-308 https://doi.that geographic distance and isolation were imagined to have secured in the distant past. Possessed of the view that hybridity in architecture, as in race, was one of the more insidious consequences of colonial contact, such notions nevertheless belied the privilege of the imperial gaze, and the authority it lent to scholarly interlocutors to speak for the cultures of the colonised. The clarity and cogency of Fergusson's arguments were compromised, furthermore, by the degree to which he struggled to align his architectural thesis with contemporary ethno-linguistic theories of racial/cultural diffusion. 3 A century later, it was the need to deconstruct the essentialist reductionism inherent in such theories and presumptions, and the problematical post-colonial legacies of the broader discursive phenomenon of "Orientalism" in which they had been formed, that attracted the critical labour of many Asia-focused scholars, including critical historians an...

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The large-scale appropriation of modernist architectural features in everyday housing projects in postcolonial India is remarkable. This article examines how regional architects adapted their engagement with architectural modernism to the evolving circumstances of architectural production within the context of the developing world. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s “field theory”, it presents a detailed case study of two decades of residential work by Architects United, a medium-scale architectural practice founded in the Indian city of Pune in 1961. While the architects’ earliest projects demonstrated an opportunity and desire for architectural innovation, this approach became increasingly restricted as new patterns for housing provision emerged, resulting in a more subdued and hybrid form of modernist architecture. The paper makes use of the architects’ previously undisclosed archive and oral history to demonstrate that these architectural adaptations were the indirect result of governance practices and societal change, particularly the government’s stimulation of co-operative housing initiatives and the emergence of a postcolonial middle class with distinct housing expectations. As such, this “peripheral” case exposes some of the processes that have been overlooked in the rhetoric of Architectural Modernism as a Western import in India, which is primarily centered around the discussion of exceptional public building commissions by “global experts” or their Indian disciples. The paper further highlights the need to investigate the processes of architectural production, in addition to the built product itself, so that a pluralistic rather than romanticized understanding of architectural practice may emerge.