UNKNOWN INDIAN MASTERPIECE

Evening Star, Issue 20310, 19 October 1929, Page 3

UNKNOWN INDIAN MASTERPIECE

WORLD'S LARGEST SINGLE DOMED BUILDING It asked what is the largest singledomed building in the world, nine people out of ten would say, the, Pantheon at Rome, but not one in a hundred would bo able to give the right answer. It is a strange thing that even architectural students arc taught to draw a line, as it were, down the Red Sea, and not recognise as architecture anything that lies oast of Suez. As a matter of tact, this distinction belongs to the tomb of Maliomoud at Bijipur, in India, called the Gold Gumbuz. Internally it is merely a room, 155 ft square. Compared with its 18,200 square feet, the Pantheon at Romo can only boast of 15,833 square feet. The actual construction is as ingenious as it is beautiful. At, a height of 57ft from the door a series of beautiful- pendentives contract to a circular opening 97ft in diameter. On the platform formed by these pendentives the dome is erected. i24ft in diameter, ■ thus leaving a gallery more than 12ft wide all round the interior. This span is equivalent almost to one and a-quartor times the ' height of Boston House, one of Capo Town's tallest buildings; while the external height of the dome is roughly 200 ft. As an engineering feat the.work of this unknown Indian architect puts into the shade that of St. Sophia, Constantinople. There the thrust of the dome is taken by tho_ huge buttresses that mar the beauty of its exterior, but this Indian genius has so contrived that the whole thrust is r'eturned inwards and downwards, leaving an exterior elevation that for beauty and simplicity of design lias few equals in the IVostein world.