Umaid Bhawan Palace

Umaid Bhawan Palace stands on a hilltop above the city of Jodhpur in the Indian state of Rajasthan, built between 1928 and 1943 for Maharaja Umaid Singh to a design by the British architect Henry Vaughan Lanchester. Commissioned partly as a famine-relief employment project during a period of severe drought, its construction employed thousands of local laborers over roughly fifteen years and used an interlocking sandstone block technique that required no mortar and little structural steel. The palace blends Indo-Saracenic and Renaissance architectural elements with an underlying Art Deco sensibility in its interior detailing, unusual for a princely Indian residence of its era, and its honey-colored sandstone exterior gives it the local name Chittar Palace. Part of the palace remains a private residence of the former royal family, part functions as a museum open to the public, and part has operated since the 1970s as a luxury hotel.