Originally Posted by pavalamani pragasam
The 'granary of Tamil Nadu',Tajore's Big Temple's store rooms for grains along the outer wall come to my mind immediately.
I feel the building material stone has a special quality of coolness. All public buildings, big, spacious ones like my old college, are big stone buildings too! Even in houses of our ancestors stones had a major share. I fondly remember the stone ledge, a finely chiselled shelf in my grandma's house for keeping water pots, specially, smoothly carved semi-spherical pits on which the pots sit well. I have heard elders explain to me that the stone shelf helps water to remain cool even in the hottest summer. Ingenuous methods when fridge was unknown!
Our ancient architects, artisans who designed & erected those beautiful structures called temples had excellent, incomparable, engineering skills, knew aesthetics, symmetry, acoustics, wind flow & every other detail connected with architecture. Temples were not only places for worship but communal, social, educational, entertaiment centres too, all wound in one package. A place where people converged. Mathematical precision vied with poetic imagination seen in the sculptures.
Waiting for interesting, illuminating explanations from a veteran!