Rock-Cut Halls to Painted Eaves: Eight Building Traditions of Asia

More than 1,500 known rock-cut structures survive in India, made by cutting away solid stone until only the intended building remained. The earliest, the Barabar Caves in Bihar, date to around 250 BCE, activity peaked in the fifth and sixth centuries CE at Ajanta and Ellora, and Buddhist, Hindu and Jain builders all used the technique.

Founded by Mayurasharma in the fourth century AD in Karnataka, this temple style became the basis for the later Hoysala style. Many temples at Aihole, Badami and Hampi are built in it, and the Kadambas also developed a sculpture school that foreran later South Indian traditions.

Systematic building for Islamic patrons began after Delhi became the Ghurid capital in 1193. It introduced the mosque and the tomb to the subcontinent and used far larger domes and arches than Hindu temples had, while local builders kept their long tradition of fine stone masonry instead of the brick common elsewhere in the Islamic world. The style peaked under the Mughals.

Flourishing under the Sikh Empire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mainly in the Punjab, this style joined Mughal elements such as onion domes and multi-foil arches with Rajput chattris and decorative friezes. The Golden Temple at Amritsar and the Keshgarh Sahib gurdwara show its early mix of flowing curves and straight lines.

Also called Beton or Baton, this vernacular style uses light timber and bamboo, steep roofs, raised plinths and wide verandas against monsoon rain and earthquakes. After the 1897 Assam earthquake, experts led by the seismologist Fusakichi Omori studied local techniques and promoted a hybrid timber, reed and mud house that could survive tremors and floods.

The vernacular wooden dwelling of the Malays of Sumatra, coastal Borneo and the Malay Peninsula is known for roofs suited to the tropics and harmonious proportions. It needs steady maintenance against weather and termites, and construction skills are fading in Malaysia as timber grows scarcer, though examples survive in rural Indonesia and on Pulau Ubin in Singapore.

A dzong is a fortified monastery of Bhutan and Tibet, with massive inward-sloping walls of white painted brick and stone, few windows in the lower sections and flared temple roofs. In Bhutan its space is traditionally split evenly between administrative and religious use, and dzongs are built without architectural plans, directed by high lamas and raised through corvee labor.

This Korean decorative colouring of wooden buildings, adapted from Chinese danqing, rests on five colours, blue, white, red, black and yellow, that stand for the cardinal directions and the centre. It is used mainly on temples and palaces, protects surfaces against temperature and insects, and its artisans, the dancheongjang, are recognised as National Intangible Cultural Heritage in South Korea.