The new Capital of British India - New Delhi: King George V proclaimed the transfer of the capital from Calcutta to Delhi at the climax of the 1911 Imperial Durbar. New Delhi was inaugurated early in 1931. Like Calcutta, it was stamped with the hallmark of authority and like most other seats of British power in India it stood apart from its Indian predecessors. This was contrary to the original intention.

The prevailing enthusiasm of Anglo-Indian imperial designers for the synthesis of eastern and western styles quailed before the problem of assimilating an urban order, devised in accordance with the principles of the modern English Garden City, and the vital chaos of Shahjahanabad: the latter seemed to be the very embodiment of all the evils of laissez-faire growth that the formulators of the Garden City movement most specifically deplored.

The ceremonial, administrative and commercial centres of the new metropolis define an equilateral triangle. The commercial centre in the north forms the apex. Rajpath, the east-west axis of power, provides their base. The northeast diagonal serves the Law; the north-west diagonal bypasses the cathedral and the originally unforeseen Parliament. Rajpath is aligned with the entrance to the Purana Qila. It runs through the India Gate War Memorial and the portal buildings of Baker's Secretariat, from the chattri in which the city's founder, the King-Emperor, stood in imperial majesty to the durbarhall of the house where his Viceroy sat.

Lutyens and his works: Lutyens had arrived in India to undertake this great work with scant respect for the Subcontinent's architectural legacy, and his views grew only the more derogatory with first-hand familiarity - especially with the Anglo-Indian Imperial hybrids developed by his immediate predecessors, but also with the traditions of 'veneered joinery' from which those hybrids were drawn.

Lutyens' imperial eclecticism ranged from Wren's St Stephen's Walbrook (for the Viceroy's library) to the Mahastupa at Sanchi (for the central cupola) and the chahar bagh. On the way he took in the ubiquitous Indian chattriand chadya, cross-fertilized acanthus and volute with padma and bell for his Order and tethered Indian elephants at salient portal corners where the great ancient Mesopotamian monarchies had ceremonial syncretic winged monsters.

Baker was equally liberal with his Indian motifs in the Secretariats and the massive, strangely unassertive, circular Parliament building, but Lutyens thought him singularly insensitive to the spirit of the scheme as a whole in the angle at which he set Rajpath's ascent between the Secretariats to the plane of the Viceroy's House.