project site: Humayun’s tomb

Project Design

In Hindu and Buddhist culture, Mandalas and Yantras are geometric compositions created as a meditative ritual, in which the practitioner experiences fundamental truths of the cosmos in the act of creation, and diagrams and instructs the human experience in the geometry of the design.

Geometric compositions evocative of mandalas are employed in Islam and Christianity to describe various aspects of the nature of God, His creation, and His relationship to humanity.

The geometries of Humayun’s Tomb, ornamental and architectural, make use of the idea of the mandala at the scale of the landscape as the gardens of paradise, at the scale of the plinth as a square wall with four gates, and at the scale of the jali (carved architectural screen) as a maze of six-pointed stars.

This project is a composition of various spaces as imagined within the figures of mandalas - a place in which the occupation and procession through spaces becomes a practice of experience in the narrative, instructive, and meditative tradition of the mandala.