ABSTRACT
The main materials used for construction described in the texts are timber, stone and bricks, while they accept the importance of knowledge of other popular materials that may be in use. 1 Although it is obvious that the representative texts on Vastu Vidya were written at a time when modern building materials like reinforced concrete and cement were not in use, the usage of the materials mentioned in the texts like stone, bricks and timber continues. Today these materials are also used to project Indian-ness in the designs, on the same principle that their rejection is used to project ‘modernity’. Outside this dynamics of preferences and prejudices lies a vast resource of traditional knowledge on these materials that finds little use in the contemporary scenario. Some of this is described below.
