A System's Evaluation of Global History of Indian Architecture by Joy Sen

System’s approach (SA) is a holistic approach of understanding. The approach streamlines how small parts or things or events influence one another within a sequence of events, which constitutes of to-and-fro causal relationships. The network of such relationships represents a whole, where more than the co-existence of parts, the pattern of relationship gains a higher significance.

Recently, the entire scientific world, ranging from social sciences to basic quantum and relativistic physics, and say, from ecology to trans-personal psychology, are being revolutionized by the system’s approach. The system approach expands from a conventional reductionist paradigm of looking at linear causal relationships to a view port of looking at things or events in a wider and deeper perspective involving a non-linear or cyclic nature.

In applied and social sciences, a system’s approach presents a system of interconnections between the evolution of human society and systems through a chain of to-and-fro relationship with environment itself. Architecture is a science of built environment, and the evolution of architectural systems likewise is an outcome of human–nature or behaviour–environment correlations, and often, these correlations are reciprocal, cyclic and complex. Under system’s approach, therefore, it is extremely important to see the architecture as a co-evolutionary function of these correlations. This is the principal essence and concern of the present book.

• ISBN: 978-81-92473-32-1
• Publication Date: January 2016
• Dimension: 6 x 9 in.
• Binding: Hardback
• Pages: 432

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Joy Sen is a Professor of Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. He is currently Head of Ranbir and Chitra Gupta School of Infrastructure and Design (2014–17). His areas of research are Community and Regional Planning Analyses & Programming and Architecture and Planning related Heritage Studies and Documentation. He is currently the Principal Investigator of two mega projects sponsored by MHRD Govt. of India: SandHI – Science and Heritage Initiative and the Future of Cities (2014–17).

Joy obtained his Bachelors in Architecture (1984) and PhD from IIT Kharagpur (2007). He obtained in Master’s Degree in Community and Regional Planning from Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA. Additionally, he received a Minor in Technology and Social Change (under UNDP-DAT program 1989) at ISU, USA. Joy received the Silver Medal for his Best Thesis Award and overall performance at the Bachelor’s level and the Best Thesis Award from ISU, USA, at the master’s level.