Cosmological Representations
8 Ibid. p. 14. 9 K. Trivedi, ‘Hindu Temple: Models of a Fractal Universe’, Visual Computer, vol. 5, no. 4, 1989, p. 243. 10 Ibid. p. 247. 11 A. Hardy, p. 37.
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In India, there are mainly two types of traditional Hindu temples: the northern Nagara, and the southern Dravidra are typologies that started to distinguish themselves in the sixth and the seventh century. During our study trip to India, we investigated temples of varying sizes belonging to the Nagara (literally meaning “of the city”) type. Certain procedures of production called “dynamisms” rule both temple traditions (except some Dravidra temples in the district Tamil Nadu, and some Nagara ones in Orissa), that we found interesting in relation to our field of study.8 The ever-unfolding nature of the universe in Hindu cosmology and the notion of Brahman is reflected in various ways in Hindu temple architecture. According to ancient architectural traditions, Hindu temples are models of the cosmos, and their structure represents fundamental concepts of the nature of the universe. Brahman is represented symbolically in Hindu temple architecture through selfsimilarity, discretization, and fractalization. Through these processes, the idea that everything exists within everything, and that the whole cosmic principle repeats itself again and again in ever smaller scales, emerges formally.9 In the ancient Vastu Shastra (which translates to “science of architecture”) one finds texts describing principles regarding the design, layout, dimensions, ground preparation, and space arrangement of Hindu temples. By following the instructions given in the Vastu Shastra, the traditional Hindu temple can be created through rules determining its proportion and growth. All of the temple’s elements are dependent on the whole, as the Vastu Shastra does not rely on absolute dimensions, but defines all dimensions as a set of relationships of components with respect to the whole. The existence of such a general system of proportional relationships enables the same procedures to be repeated at various scales and is a way of bringing forth self-similar properties in the architecture.10 The self-similar and fractal geometry of the temples is found through the application of certain processes called dynamisms by the architect and architecture historian Adam Hardy in his book The Temple Architecture of India. These dynamisms are methods of breaking, copying, scaling and splitting forms into subforms, and together they determine the characteristic visual features of the temples. The dynamisms common to the Nagara temples that we studied are called: projection, staggering, splitting, bursting of boundaries, progressive multiplication, and expanding repetition.11
