The temple architecture in India occupies a very important place in the history of Indian Architecture. The earliest example of freestanding temple found is from 5th century A.D. , and the architecture actively continued until around 17th century A. D. Indian temple architecture falls broadly into two categories - the North Indian (Nagara) and the South Indian (Dravida); though neither is confined entirely to its respective region. The Southern style flourished into two different regions of South India, and the school established in the Karnataka region is referred to as Karnata- Dravida style.

Karnata- Dravida temples are the products of a continuous, coherent tradition lasting about seven hundred years (7th Century A.D. - 14th Century A.D.), during which the architectural forms underwent a gradual and dramatic transformation. The main purpose of this research is to characterise the commonalty of all these designs and at the same time to sustain the wide variety that distinguishes each of them. This pluralistic approach is more succinct than conventional analysis , which are limited to broad categorisations or vague verbalisations as far as spatial matters are concerned. Furthermore, it avoids the need of a chronological ordering and the implicit search for an ideal type, by allowing various types to be generated and sometimes throwing light on the ways in which the simple types were combined to form complex designs.

Shape Grammar:
Shape grammars (Stiny, G. 1980) generate languages of design; just as a phrase structure grammar generates new phrases. A phrase structure grammar for natural language has a set of alphabets and arranges the alphabets using a fixed set of rules to generate words and sentences. Similarly, a shape grammar has an initial shape, a finite set of shape rules and two sets of shapes. A shape is generated by beginning with the initial shape and applying the shape rules until no shape rule can be applied anymore.

Shape grammars have been widely used over the past few decades to describe and understand a diversity of architectural and other designs. This grammar has been used to perform 1)the analysis or description of a certain style of design, and
2) the synthesis of completely new and original styles of designs.
Applications concerned with the analysis of a certain style and synthesis of design under that style include Languages of Palladian Villas (1978), Japanese Tea-rooms (1981), Frank Lloyd WrightÕs Prairie Houses (1981), Wren's City Churches in London (1993) , Queen Ann Houses (1986) etc.

Present Research:

In this research, an attempt is made to describe the style of Karnata- Dravida school of Indian temple Architecture. The exercise essentially consists of beginning with a given arrangement or arrangements of certain spatial elements (existing temple designs in this case) and identifying or constructing additional arrangements of these elements that are on this same style.

Developing a grammar entails
1)extracting the simple recurring formal elements from the data,
2)eliciting the spatial relations between these elements,
3)expressing transformations in the elements and the spatial relations in shape rules, and
4) with anticipation of the spatial effects of these transformations on the global composition - elaborating a sequence in which these shape rules can be applied to a given initial shape to generate various other temple plans under the given style.
In short the grammar will define the language of Indian temple design of Karnata-Dravida school.

Now, the principal elements of an Indian temple is the sanctuary where the image of God is situated (called GarbhaGrha ). In front of this is a pillared hall (called Mandapa ) for the assembly of the devotees. There are also auxiliary spaces like ambulatory path, porches, stairs etc. Orientation of a temple is generally fixed (to the East) and the architectural elements (like projections, buttresses, shape ) are basically guided by old religious texts for building.

Examination of some 120 designs of temple under the Karnata- Dravida school are now in progress, which were documented by Dr. Adam Hardy on the basis of his own observations and existing reference. The (parametric) shape grammar for this school of temple design will be based on a corpus of a wide number of these designs. Designs in this corpus will be chosen carefully to cover a variety of plan types, so that exhaustively, they include all the featuristic elements, especially the auxiliary and non-customary ones.

The shape rules will essentially include choosing the main axis and orientation of the plan, placing the main elements like GarbhaGrha, Mandapa and other auxiliary spaces, and lastly forming the shape of the outer wall of the temple building.