Saturday, June 26, 2010

Loosing technology of our elders

There are so many specialties of construction of houses in Kerala adopted by our earlier experts of House construction.Most of these die with that expert as he never bothers to pass on the knowledge to next generation.With his death ,the technology dies.

We have heard a lot on Perumthachan.There are  exceptionally great work of Architecture used in temple construction at Uliyannoor  near Alwaye where Perumthachan used to live.Whatever extra ordinary capabilities Perumthachan had in designing and building is not available in any books and nobody has made an attempt to study specialties of those buildings.Similarly the technology of making tiled roof with wooden rafters which was so common in Kerala of yester years is practically lost as it is very difficult to find people who know about such roof structure work now as nobody practically do such roof work now.In one of the houses which I built about ten years back,owner of the house(An Advocate of high court of Kerala,who is no more now) insisted on having such a roof for portion of his house facing a lake at Kadavanthra in Cochin.Even though he called me to see the work in progress,even I did not bother to learn the technique from those carpenters.

There are so many special features of olden days Kerala Architecture which are simply forgotten.It will be good if some one can at least make a study of such features by visiting such old buildings and houses in Kerala.Thekkanattu Parayil house at Thycattussery near Cherthala which is about 120 years old is one of those remarkable houses using olden days Kerala architecture features.

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