Osmania University: Epic in Granite

360° Panoramic Views 1

For three months, they toured the States studying the architectural styles of older universities like Princeton, Harvard and Yale and the more recent campuses of California, Stanford and New York. From America, they journeyed to England where they studied the architectural niceties of older universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburough and Manchester and also visited buildings under construction of the universities of Kingston, Birmingham and Leeds. Their itinerary took them to Europe where they visited the campuses of Sorbonne, Heidelberg, Munich and Berlin and Austria. They rounded up their tour with visits to Egypt and Turkey to observe Islamic architectural styles.

To sum up in Ali Raza’s words: “In the construction of all Osmania buildings, motifs from different historical periods were borrowed and were made into a harmonious blending. The pillars were modelled on pillars from Ajanta and Ellora caves. The arches were modelled on the arches from the monuments at Delhi, Agra and Charminar and the Mecca Masjid of Hyderabad. In some places, arches and pillars in the styles of Arabia have been constructed. In this way, we have purposely ignored the modern architecture of (Lutyen’s) Delhi.”

In short, the Arts College building is a torrent of architectural glory unleashed on the spectator, a freeze on history, an epic in granite, and a marvel of a visual difficult to denote.

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