Typo-morphological analysis of the Hindu temple: a tool aimed to inform conservation practices of the Indian architectural heritage

Try to understand the architecture’s sense essentially means to answer to the Louis Khan’s question: 'What does the building want to be?' This is a question that finds a response in the idea of architecture like ‘institution’, without regretting the concepts of type and morphology. In the specific case of this essay, such an institution is recognized in the architecture of the Hindu temple i.e. architecture based on an previously established order, that is an 'essentia'. Unlike most of a recent literature rather focused to enhance the condition of spirituality that dominates on Hindu temples (for example, Percy Brown defines the Temple as a where the 'spiritual dominates on the material’), the following essay tries to trace the evolutionary process of the Hindu Temple through a typo-morphological reading of its characters in order to consciously orient current design practices.