ABSTRACT
The artist chooses his materials, but the materials also choose themselves. In these early drawings, done a quarter of a century ago in Ladakh on the extreme northwestern periphery of the Tibetan world, Robert Powell set about recording the physical beauty of the architectural structures of the Himalayas. These drawings merge aesthetics, ethnography and architectural design, the pleasure of the eye, the skill of the hand, the knowledge of a way of life. Ladakh lies in the most western portion of a vast zone of high altitude civilisation that spreads out eastwards and northwards across thousands of kilometres of rugged land. In that climate of sudden and extreme changes of temperature, the single most important consideration in architecture is the sun. This Ladakhi kitchen, like every kitchen in the Tibetan world, is lit by a single broad shaft of light from the sky-door.
