Rashtrapati Bhavan

This guide to Rashtrapati Bhavan in Delhi opens with a lopsided fact worth sitting with: the building took seventeen years to construct, and the British who commissioned it used it for sixteen. It traces architect Edwin Lutyens, his letters dismissing Indian architecture and his ambition to plant England's traditions here regardless, through construction that ran from 1912 to 1929 and the palace's three hundred and forty rooms. Look up at the dome and the colonnades stretching out on either side.