An architectural link between masala dosas and war. The unlikely potentials of Otto Koenigsberger’s shrinking heritage

In my experience, the process of conducting architectural historical research is not smooth. It cannot be accurately planned in advance, or broken down into a precise schedule of hours to be spent in archives and libraries. It is a messy undertaking, an ungainly stumbling from one potential source of information to another, whereby unlikely connections are unearthed and dirty data are harvested. Cleaned up, cross-checked and organized into a narrative form, the ensuing collage is less the result of the rigorous proving of an objective hypothesis than an attempt to understand the significance of a portion of interwoven past realities that have been pasted together subjectively. As well as addressing the foibles of historical research, this work-in-progress paper attempts to address the consequences of some of the paradoxes such research can uncover.