A recent conversation with a friend brought back an old discomfort, one many architects trained in the late twentieth century will recognise. We spoke about a shift in the work of several modernist architects during the 1990s: a visible movement toward symbolism. At this time, their otherwise beautiful modernist works suddenly turned “Po-Mo.” Skews appeared; arches and decorative motifs found their way into what had been a clear International Style. There was a new concern to make the work more contextual, to make it belong to its place. We discussed this shift in widely recognised figures in India, such as Balkrishna Doshi in the National Institute of Fashion Technology campus, Charles Correa in the Jawahar Kala Kendra, and Achyut Kanvinde in the ISKCON temple, and also closer to home, in the later work of my parents, Sumit Ghosh and Suchitra Ghosh. This could also be traced to earlier movements in the works of Philip Johnson, James Stirling, Michael Graves, Arata Isozaki, and others.
B. V. Doshi, NIFT Delhi. Photo by Vastushilpa Consultants found here
For those of us who held modernist commitments like clarity, honesty, and utility close, this turn was often met with suspicion. Symbolism seems to offer an easy way out: pointing to something, or placing meaning in references, motifs, or cultural cues rather than using a logic grounded in the act of making. Many of us felt that reverence toward tradition could be sustained without such overt signs.
Charles Correa, Jaipur Kala Kendra, Jaipur. Photo by Chainwit, CC BY-SA 4.0 Source
Yet these architects made the move anyway, late in their careers, after decades of discipline, restraint, and technical mastery.
Were we, as modernists, too quick to dismiss symbolism as nostalgia or compromise? Was something else at work? Is it possible to define representation as something other than referencing an external object? Can these late-career projects be perhaps read as a struggle to avoid reducing symbolism to mere pointing?
S. Ghosh & Associates, Corporate R&D Centre for Bharat Petroleum, Greater NOIDA. Photo Courtesy: S. Ghosh & Associates
To ask whether architecture represents something is already to assume a familiar definition of representation as substitution. In this view, a drawing stands in for the building it depicts, and a borrowed architectural element stands in for whatever meaning it is meant to invoke. A pediment from a sixteenth-century Florentine building is itself a representation of a fourth-century BCE Greek temple. It once indicated the presence of a large gabled roof of an established public building behind the pediment. Planted on the facade of a contemporary mall in Noida, it now signals what is absent: authority, legitimacy, and cultural weight. In such cases, meaning lies elsewhere, and the architectural object merely points toward it.
(right) Sketch of Shikhara, ISKCON Temple, Delhi. © Kanvinde Rai Chaowdhury
This type of architecture brings it closer to the realm of illustration. The building becomes an object that points beyond itself to myth, culture, history, or identity, while remaining separate from what it signifies. Within such a framework, symbolism often appears superficial because meaning can be detached and transferred. This unease shaped much of the modernist resistance to symbolic form; if meaning can be relocated, architecture risks losing its internal necessity.
Yet this is not the only way representation has been understood. I found myself returning to an old paper I wrote many years ago, titled ‘Does the Greek Temple Represent?‘.
At this point, it becomes necessary to consider a very different conception of representation—one that does not rely on substitution at all. Heidegger offers precisely such a provocation in The Origin of the Work of Art, where he writes, “A Greek temple portrays nothing.” The force of this statement lies in how deeply it unsettles our habitual ways of thinking. After all, as Ernst Cassirer and others have acknowledged, human action is profoundly symbolic; nothing we do stands in pure isolation.
When we ask whether a Greek temple represents something, we usually mean something familiar. Does it stand for the gods? Does it symbolise divine order, myth, or cosmic harmony? This way of thinking assumes that architecture operates like a sign or a picture—an object that points toward something else. That assumption itself requires examination. What if the Greek temple does not function as a symbol at all?
According to Heidegger, the temple, by standing where it stands, rooted in the ground and open to the sky, establishes a world. It gives things their appearance and other people an orientation within their existence. Without the temple, there would be no shared reference through which things made by human hands could be situated within natural systems for the Greeks, and no stable way of orienting existence.
Temple of Hephaestus, Athens. Photo Source
This form of representation differs from substitution or “standing in” for something absent. It is a “bringing-into-presence,” allowing something to appear as what it is. Truth does not occur here as correspondence or the transmission of information, but as alētheia, or “unconcealment.”
Truth is not a piece of fact or knowledge; it is something already known to us but revealed to our conscious minds through something like a work of art, or in this case, the temple.
To the ancient Greeks, the temple did not stand in for the presence of the gods. Instead, it revealed something more fundamental: a relatable and essential form (eidos) that, in its perfected proportions and crafted appearance, made visible an ideal or essence of order, harmony, and structure in the world. The temple also helped situate human beings within the cosmos, showing them their place, their relationship to nature, to community, and to the divine order. It “opened up a world” (in Heidegger’s sense) by disclosing how people saw themselves and the world around them.
This shift in thinking demands that we pay close attention to how things appear and how they are made. For the Greeks, eidos meant the visible form of a thing: its shape, structure, and the logic of its construction. There was no hidden idea or concept behind the appearance. A simple example is the crafted pot: its very shape, the way it holds, contains, and defines an inside and an outside, is its essence made visible. Nothing lies behind it to make it “more truly” a pot. It does not become more real or more true beyond what is seen; instead, it becomes itself by appearing. It’s being is not located beneath or behind its appearance but is realised as appearance.
This becomes clearer when we remember that the ancients had few visual references, mostly simple vernacular shelters made from timber roofs and stone walls. By contrast, our modern world is overloaded with images, styles, and references. Things constantly remind us of other things they resemble or try to imitate. The density of such imagery makes it hard to comprehend how a single object, such as a Greek temple, could once have provided an entire people with a shared orientation toward the world and a coherent understanding of their lives.
Making, or technē, was not the imposition of form on matter, but a mode of knowing through which form could emerge. The architect did not fabricate an idea and then realise it; the act of building itself brought something into presence. Replicating what had been done before was not the goal. The Greeks could have referred to the Mycenaeans or the Egyptians before them, and perhaps they did, but the temple, as Heidegger argues, “gathered” and held the earth and the heavens, connecting mortals to the divine.
“But did the ancient Greeks also imitate the Egyptians?” one might ask. A clarification regarding mimēsis is therefore essential. Modern usage reduces mimēsis to copying through its Latin derivative, imitatio. However, Greek mimēsis works through recall, in which resemblance becomes secondary to the alignment of form with an order that emerges during its making. Resemblance operates within this process, but it does not govern it. This too is difficult for us to imagine, given the multiple means of representation at our disposal: photographs, models, and visualisations. But when you had only eyes to record and a thick quill to transmit an idea, you would take away only the essentials.
A concern with inherent structural logic, honed through making, becomes second nature. It becomes a found coherence, an alignment with a higher order in which relations find accord. This is why proportion in Greek architecture cannot be reduced to mathematics alone. Proportion is relational. It is analogia: a laying alongside, a correspondence through which parts are drawn into relation. In this sense, analogia carries forward the same structural logic by “laying one thing alongside another”—not as mere comparison, but as a way of revealing how forms correspond so naturally that their relationships feel like second nature.
Order, in this sense, is not premeditated. It takes shape through the conditions established by the work itself: its making, what it draws into relation, and the lives of the people involved.
The root of the word “order,” from the Latin ōrdō (meaning line, arrangement, or rule) and the Proto-Indo-European ar (meaning to fit together or join), shows the term was never meant to describe an external logic imposed on material form. It was the joining of form, material, and the actions of a people that gave rise to order. This holding together is harmonia, a term from the practices of weaving and joining, where elements are drawn into relation, tightened, and sustained as a coherent whole.
Seen in this way, representation emerges as a condition of gathering, sustained through the inward holding of relations and their continued presence over time. Returning to the buildings that prompted this reflection, can the later works of these architects be approached through a similar reading? Could what appears as a reference be, instead, a thickening of the weave that allowed more strands to remain together? Did climate, ritual, memory, material, and institutional life press more insistently into form? Did the buildings allow these forces to persist within their form?
I would have to say: no.
These buildings were a reaction to the austerity of modern form, which was seen as unplayful and vacuous. The intellectual “play” behind these projects reveals no intention toward inherent order, but allows elements to remain in uncomfortable suspension, disconnected from the structural and material logic that might ground them. The attempt, I am sure, was genuine: to reintegrate what modernism had excluded—context, memory, ritual—but they lacked the vocabulary or patience to do sothrough pure technē. Perhaps the incongruence reflected an authentic struggle rather than a straightforward pastiche.
Yet most of the postmodern movement that deployed historic symbolism was, I am afraid, merely the emotional outburst of a rebellious adolescent in the presence of a more thoughtful, though not faultless, parent. Its unfortunate persistence in contemporary, developer-driven architecture, like a bad case of acne, is another matter.
The Greek temple may not serve as a guide for architectural practice today. It may, however, offer a reminder of how form can remain open to memory and use without retreating into abstraction. Read this way, representation may cease to operate as mere reference. It could be sustained through rigorous making. Only through such earnest attempts can meaning stay in play: in the way a building gathers, in the relations it holds in place, and in the world that slowly takes shape around it.
