Unassuming, commonplace and deceptively functional, the vegetarian restaurant inside the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) campus would not elicit a second look.
But probe deeper, and you would be right inside a building designed in the early 1940’s for a hydrogen plant that supplied the gas to the United States Army Air Forces. Yes, the Americans needed it because they had just taken over Hindustan Aircraft (which later morphed into HAL) to service its World War II airplanes headed to South Eas Asia!
Now, that is a lot of history but forgotten and dumped. It took an Scottish researcher, Rachel Lee, this year to ferret out the building design from photographs and piece together a remarkable chapter in Bangalore’s aviation timeline.
She had stumbled upon the images, as she dug deep inside IISc to track down structures designed by the unheralded German architect Otto Koenigsberger. Rachel found many, but none were as tricky and mysterious as the Hydrogen Plant.
Travelling across India and Germany, Rachel had a big collection of pictures that showed the distinct architectural style of Koenigsberger, who had served as the Government architect of the erstwhile Mysore State. The hydrogen plant building carried the same stamp. But the black and white image’s quality was poor, and she could make no sense of the grey, undulating patch that lay outside the structure.
11/10/13 Rasheed Kappan/Decan Herald
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But probe deeper, and you would be right inside a building designed in the early 1940’s for a hydrogen plant that supplied the gas to the United States Army Air Forces. Yes, the Americans needed it because they had just taken over Hindustan Aircraft (which later morphed into HAL) to service its World War II airplanes headed to South Eas Asia!
Now, that is a lot of history but forgotten and dumped. It took an Scottish researcher, Rachel Lee, this year to ferret out the building design from photographs and piece together a remarkable chapter in Bangalore’s aviation timeline.
She had stumbled upon the images, as she dug deep inside IISc to track down structures designed by the unheralded German architect Otto Koenigsberger. Rachel found many, but none were as tricky and mysterious as the Hydrogen Plant.
Travelling across India and Germany, Rachel had a big collection of pictures that showed the distinct architectural style of Koenigsberger, who had served as the Government architect of the erstwhile Mysore State. The hydrogen plant building carried the same stamp. But the black and white image’s quality was poor, and she could make no sense of the grey, undulating patch that lay outside the structure.
11/10/13 Rasheed Kappan/Decan Herald
