Hawa Mahal

Judged on purpose, structure and site. The purpose compels the screen: women of a court kept in purdah had to see a street without being seen from it, and the jharokha veiled in jali is exactly that instrument, a seat projected over the street with a stone veil before the face. Each window answers to a seat and a gaze, so the repetition is not ornament counted out; it is the number of places from which to watch. The site compels the thinness: quarters that lay back from the bazaar reached the street with a wall that could be looked through. What resists the subtractive test is the height and the outline. The upper tiers add watchers, but chiefly they add figure, a crest for the street to see, display laid over concealment; the curved roofs and much of the painted detail could go without loss to the use. The cap is cleared, by a tenth.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Disclosure through space is credited as fully as disclosure in words. What the building states, and what holds: a way of living in which the royal women took part in the life of their city only as a gaze, present at the procession and absent from it. The jharokha had said this in every zenana of north India. Here the zenana’s screen becomes the palace’s whole public face, so that the instrument of seclusion is the thing the city looks at, and the street sees a wall of eyes it cannot see. That reversal is a meaning, not a mood. Part of it is unintended and holds the better for that: the measure of the confinement is legible in the size of the seats and the shallowness of the rooms. Held below the gate because it discloses one condition, made by the household that imposed it, and much of what it now gives is the delight of its pattern.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Height is moderate and frequency real, of one kind. From the street the front rises in tiers of small bays to its crest, and in the early sun the pink stone and the depth of the lattices give it a lightness, a building that seems made of openings: wonder at intricacy more than grandeur. Within, the elevation is quieter and more particular: the street below broken into points of light through the jali, the breeze moving through the bays, the city laid out from the upper storeys toward the palace and the hills. The rooms themselves are small and plain, and the rear is ordinary. There is no grandeur of space and no dread. The building delights again and again, outside and in, and does not overwhelm; it stands below the towers and halls that lift by mass and space.

Score: 7.6 / 10

One archetype is built, not alluded to: the veil. The front is a threshold between the seen and the unseen that is not a door but a surface, and it is load-bearing, since the whole front is that threshold and nothing else. A second figure is the crest, tiers rising to one point. A tradition, which cannot be confirmed, reads the outline as the crown of Krishna, to whom Pratap Singh was devoted; if so, the sacred is evoked by outline and not built into the plan. The jharokha carries a royal archetype, the window of appearance from which a ruler showed himself to his people, and here it is turned inside out: a window of watching from which no one is shown. That inversion is the deepest thing in the building, and it stays particular. Held well below the gate because the myth is one figure, carried by the front; the plan behind it holds none of it.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The inheritance is the Rajput and Mughal palace of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: its jharokhas, jali screens, curved bangla roofs and chhatris, and the zenana with its screened galleries at Amber, at Fatehpur Sikri and in the forts of Rajasthan. Every element of the Hawa Mahal is inherited. The departure is in proportion and role. The screen, which had been one part of a palace wall, becomes a whole building, five storeys of bays with almost nothing behind them, and the zenana’s private apparatus becomes the city’s public front. That is a real turn. The stake was modest: the forms were proven, the craftsmen trained in them, the cost within a court’s reach. A tradition, unconfirmed, names a model in the Khetri Mahal at Jhunjhunu; if it holds, the turn is one of scale and setting more than of kind. A swerve of emphasis, carried far, without great risk.

Score: 7.5 / 10

Would changing the form change what the work knows? On the front, entirely. Put the same women behind a plain wall with a few windows, or in an open gallery, and the building can no longer say what it says: that to see without being seen was the whole share of the city these women were given. The form is the knowledge, and it changes how the purpose is lived: each watcher has her own projected seat and her own frame on the street, the lattice softening the light and passing the air. Held below the higher bands because the form knows one thing intensely and the rest of the building knows little. The courtyards and the rear are the ordinary palace architecture of their day, and the rooms are passages serving the screen rather than places with a life of their own.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Evidence over promise: more than two centuries of looking, and a thin record of return. The building has been drawn, photographed and copied as the emblem of Jaipur since the nineteenth century, and it is read now in three ways: as the masterpiece of the Rajput screen; as a document of purdah and of the gaze; and as a climatic device, the lattice as passive cooling, a reading taken up again by architects working in hot climates. Each holds something. Near at hand the lattices vary more than a first look suggests, and the city seen through them is a different city from the street. But the literature is small beside that of the great palaces and tombs, the questions are few and mostly settled, its date, its maker and its purpose, and much of the return is the same pleasure in the same pattern. The lowest axis but one.

Score: 7.2 / 10

The field is the Rajput palace and the building of north India in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The intrinsic force is modest. The building is a culmination and a concentration of a vocabulary, the screen made total, not a reorganisation of what building could do; its plan, structure and use are those of its tradition. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide as emblem, narrow as model. It became the sign of Jaipur and of Rajasthan, the pink city’s own image of itself, copied in pictures, souvenirs and the fronts of hotels. As architecture its reach is slight and partly second-hand: the jali as a climatic skin in modern building in India and beyond owes more to the tradition than to this one front, though the Hawa Mahal is its most famous instance. Force low, reach as image high, reach as architecture slight.

Score: 7.4 / 10

Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over two hundred and twenty-seven years. The form survives whole and legible: the street front stands as built, every storey and bay in place, its governing idea known at a glance, and it has outlived the court, the zenana and the purdah that produced it. The use is lost. No women watch from it as its purpose was; it has not been a palace in use for generations, and it is entered daily as a museum and a view. The fabric is charged in part: lime plaster, paint and some lattice renewed in repeated restorations, the pink itself a later wash, the extent of replacement not known. Its presence is among the widest of any building in India, and that earns at most a tenth. Centuries with the form whole and the use lost, at the near edge of that span, with a partial charge on fabric: the highest of the twelve.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included, to the same anchors as every desk. The command of the screen is high and load-bearing: lattices cut from stone in fine and varied patterns; bays corbelled out storey above storey; their small domed and curved roofs set in a rhythm that resolves the front into one stepped figure; and a five-storey wall of shallow galleries made to stand through two centuries of monsoon. The movement of air through the lattice is built, not an accident of pattern. The costs: the structure is the ordinary masonry of its tradition, with no structural invention; the front is a stacking of one module, handled with control but without the modulation of the greatest Mughal fronts; the painted finish over plaster is surface; the rear and the interiors are plain. Command of the screen outruns command of the whole.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the jali in the lowest bays at the street and the crest of small domes at the top. One law governs both, the projected bay with its lattice, repeated, stacked and diminished toward the crest, every part an eye on the street. The colour and the painted borders carry the law across the front, and the ramps and galleries behind serve it. What bends it: the rear and the courtyards obey another and older physics, that of the courtyard palace, so that the building is a screen on one face and a plain palace annexe on the other. And the law, however consistently held, is narrow: one module and one purpose. Narrowness is not coherence. The front’s coherence is near complete; the whole’s is not.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Orders held: the royal household and its women, as subject and user; the city and its street, the bazaar and the festival procession, as the thing watched; the state, as the palace that owns both; and the natural order, in the wind and light the lattice admits, built into the form. The gaze through the screen joins household, street and state in one relation, so these are integrated, not listed. The sacred enters, if at all, only through the contested reading of the outline. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent, or present only as what is withheld: labour, the body except as hidden, worship as practised, death, and history beyond one court’s custom. A screen holds one relation between a court and a city, and the figure describes the form.

Score: 6.6 / 10