Indo-Saracenic architecture

With a number of exceptions from earlier, most Indo-Saracenic public buildings were constructed by parts of the British Raj government of India, in place between 1858 and 1947, with the peak period beginning around 1880. They partly reflected the British aspiration for an "Imperial style" of their own, rendered on an intentionally grand scale, reflecting and promoting a notion of an unassailable and invincible British Empire, The style has been described as "part of a 19th-century movement to project themselves as the natural successors of the Mughals". At the same time they were built for modern functions such as railway stations, government offices for an increasingly wide-reaching bureaucracy, and law courts. They often incorporated modern construction methods and facilities. While stone was typically used, at least as a facing, these included substructures composed of iron, steel and poured concrete, and later reinforced concrete and pre-cast concrete elements. The style has been said, by a native of Kolkata, to be most common in "Southern and Western India", and of the three main cities of the 19th-century Raj, it was and is much more evident in Mumbai and Chennai rather than Kolkata, where both public government buildings, and the mansions of wealthy Indians tended to use versions of European Neoclassical architecture. Madras (now Chennai) was a particular centre of the style, but still tended to use details from Mughal architecture, which had barely ever reached Tamil Nadu before. This was partly because English authorities such as James Fergusson especially deprecated Dravidian architecture, which would also have been harder and more expensive to adapt to modern building functions. Typical elements found include: • onion (bulbous) domes • Chhajja, overhanging eaves, often supported by conspicuous brackets • pointed arches, cusped arches, or scalloped arches • horseshoe arches, in fact characteristic of Islamic Spain or North Africa, but often used • contrasting colours of voussoirs round an arch, especially red and white; another feature more typical of North Africa and Spain • curved roofs in Bengali styles such as char-chala • domed chhatri kiosks on the roofline • pinnacles • towers or minarets • open pavilions or pavilions with Bangala roofs • jalis or openwork screens • Mashrabiya or jharokha-style screened windows • Iwans, in the form of entrances set back from the facade, under an arch. Chief proponents of this style of architecture included Robert Fellowes Chisholm, Sir Samuel Swinton Jacob, Charles Mant, Henry Irwin, William Emerson, George Wittet and Frederick Stevens, along with numerous other skilled professionals and artisans throughout Europe and the Americas. was built in an Indo-Saracenic Revival architectural style in Peshawar, Pakistan. in Jaipur reflecting Imperial Rajasthani architecture. Early 20th-century. Structures built in Indo-Saracenic style in India and in certain nearby countries were predominantly grand public edifices, such as clock towers and courthouses. Likewise, civic as well as municipal and governmental colleges along with town halls counted this style among its top-ranked and most-prized structures to this day; ironically, in Britain itself, for example, King George IV's Royal Pavilion at Brighton, (which twice in its lifetime has been threatened with being torn-down, denigrated by some as a "carnival sideshow", and dismissed as "an architectural folly of inferior design", no less) and elsewhere, these rare and often diminutive (though sometimes, as mentioned, of grand-scale), residential structures that exhibit this colonial style are highly valuable and prized by the communities in which they exist as being somehow "magical" in appearance. Typically, in India, villages, towns and cities of some means would lavish significant sums on construction of such architectural works when plans were drawn up for construction of the local railway stations, museums and art galleries. The cost involved in the construction of buildings of this style was high, including all their inherent customization, ornament and minutia decoration, the artisans' ingenious skills (stone and wood carving, as well as the exquisite lapidary/inlaid work) and usual accessibility to requisite raw materials, hence the style was executed only on buildings of a grand scale. However the occasional residential structure of this sort, (its being built in part or whole with Indo-Saracenic design elements/motifs) did appear quite often, and such buildings have grown ever more valuable and highly prized by local and foreign populations for their exuberant beauty and elegance today. Either evidenced in a property's primary unit or any of its outbuildings, such estate-caliber residential properties lucky enough to boost the presence of an Indo-Saracenic structure, are still to be seen, generally, where in instances urban sprawl has not yet overcome them; often they are to be found in exclusive neighborhoods' (or surrounded, as cherished survivors, by enormous sky-scrapers, in more recently claimed urbanized areas throughout this "techno" driven, socio-economic revolutionary era marking India's recent decade's history), and are often locally referred to as "mini-palaces". Usually, their form-factors are these: townhouse, wings and/or porticoes. Additionally, more often seen are the diminutive renditions of the Indo-Saracenic style, built originally for lesser budgets, finding their nonetheless romantic expression in the occasional and serenely beautiful garden pavilion outbuildings, throughout the world, especially, in India and England. ==Indian context==