SS Rajamouli, the director of Baahubali 1 & Baahubali 2, has issued a clarification about his role in the designing of Andhra Pradesh’s new capital city, Amaravati.
A report in The Indian Express says that Rajamouli said he has only been acting as a go-between the Andhra Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu and the design firm that has been contracted to plan the new city.
Rajamouli also tweeted:
Various news that I was appointed as a consultant, designer, supervisor etc for Amaravathi are not true..
— rajamouli ss (@ssrajamouli) September 21, 2017
Foster + Partners are a world renowned architectural firm. The designs they submitted were first class in my opinion.
— rajamouli ss (@ssrajamouli) September 21, 2017
.@NCBN garu and his team are very happy with it but he wanted a design for the assembly to be much more iconic.
— rajamouli ss (@ssrajamouli) September 21, 2017
All I am doing is interpreting the vision of @NCBN garu to Foster + Partners to quicken the process.
— rajamouli ss (@ssrajamouli) September 21, 2017
Hope this small contribution of mine is some kind of help in that epic project..:)
— rajamouli ss (@ssrajamouli) September 21, 2017
An earlier story in the Scroll traced the timeline of events leading up to Rajamouli’s involvement in the project. After hiring a team of Singapore-based architects and city planners to design the new capital, Naidu demanded that the new city be Vaastu compliant, a request not part of the original brief. Later, he fired the Singapore designers and hired London-based award winning firm Foster & Partners to design the city. However, reports said Naidu felt the design was lacking in Indian elements and thus engaged Rajamouli, who “designed” the mythical, fictional city of Mahishmati, from Baahubali, to give design inputs to the firm.
