Purna in Architecture examines how architecture might be understood through the idea of Purna, and what such an enquiry can reveal about the relationship between philosophy, design and the practice of building. Rather than beginning with a fixed definition, Anisha Shekhar Mukherji questions the assumptions contained in Purna itself, in the idea of an “Indic worldview”, and in the distinction between the Indic and the Indian. Her method deliberately incorporates purvapaksha, turning the enquiry back upon its own premises before developing its argument.Drawing also on lakshana-parichay, the recognition of an idea or thing through its essential attributes, Mukherji brings philosophical enquiry into direct conversation with architectural thought and practice. She applies this approach to the Mayamatam, to the architecture and planning of Shahjahanabad, and to the Delhi Jantar Mantar, examining in different ways the relationships between built form, human life, environment and larger cosmic or social frameworks.The book is concerned not only with interpreting earlier architectural traditions but with what they might contribute to architectural practice in the present. It asks whether architecture can be understood as a setting for interdependence and interconnectedness, responsive to climate, context and the conditions of human life. Moving from Purna in architecture towards Purna as architecture, it seeks to recover a philosophical dimension of architecture without reducing philosophy to a decorative or rhetorical addition to design.
Anisha Shekhar Mukherji
Anisha Shekhar Mukherji is an architect specialising in conservation, an architectural historian, designer, researcher and author. An alumna of the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, she studied architectural conservation at De Montfort University, Leicester, as an ODA Scholar. She has taught as Visiting Faculty at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, and has worked as a conservation consultant on projects involving institutions including the Archaeological Survey of India, the World Bank, The Doon School and Park Hotels Apeejay. She is also a Founding Director of Ambi Knowledge Resources.
Her work brings together architectural history, conservation, design practice and the study of knowledge embedded in historical sites and building traditions. Her books include The Red Fort of Shahjahanabad (Oxford University Press, 2003), subsequently published in a substantially expanded new edition as The Red Fort of Shahjahanabad: An Architectural History (2024); Jantar Mantar: Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh’s Observatory in Delhi (2010); and Attributing Design Identity; Identifying Design Attributes (2020). She also co-edited, with Snehanshu Mukherjee, Renewing Design with Communities: Another Way of Building (Routledge, 2023).
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