MUMBAI:, April 26 -- In 1926, when German architect Walter Gropius built the Dessau campus for his fabled art school, The Bauhaus, it was a steel structure with a glass curtain wall. As a curator recently put it, "It must have been like a spaceship landing in Germany." Manik Bagh in Indore, built in 1933 for Maharaja Yeshwant Rao Holkar II, might have elicited a similar reaction. A U-shaped stucco mansion with crisp straight lines and clean rectangles, the structure had no surface decoration, domes or ogee-shaped arches. Designed by German architect Eckart Muthesius, the 40 rooms were planned in exhaustive, if minimalistic, detail. Some of its light fixtures, all designed by Muthesius, would be right at home in Apollo 11.

A travelling ph...