Sameep Padora & Associates has designed a Hindu temple complex partially surrounded by a moat for the village of Nandyal in Andhra Pradesh, India.
The architecture studio created the stepped temples from local black limestone slabs to create a modern take on the traditional Hindu temple forms.

"More than the temple being different from its predecessors, I think it's more like a variant," said Sameep Padora & Associates principal Sameep Padora.
"Modernity wasn't really a preoccupation for the design of the temple," he told Dezeen. "It was about how the temple was located in its physical context, the available resources and what real value we were able to create using the temple as a catalyst."
The complex contains two tower-topped shrines, along with an elongated building that contains a kitchen for preparing offerings, public toilets and the priest's quarters. Alongside the temples is a water tank, known as a Pushkarini.
Sameep Padora & Associates based the arrangement of the buildings and water pond on a 10th-century temple that is located in Tirupathi, southern India.

"The planning of our temple carries forward the historic precedent of temple plans which addresses the two shrines and the bathing pond for the deity at the entry," explained Padora.
"It uses many of the same tropes like the elaborate horizontality in the construct of most traditionally temple design but abstracts that further," he continu...