King Kothi Palace, Hyderabad
The city of smiles, of lights, of a thousand faces, endearingly called the Pearl City, Hyderabad offers a variety of tourist attractions ranging from Heritage monuments, Lakes and Parks, Gardens and Resorts, Museums to delectable cuisine and a delightful shopping experience. To the traveller, Hyderabad offers a fascinating panorama of the past, with a richly mixed cultural and historical tradition spanning 400 colourful years.

Ninth in the super success of the series on the glorious history and the palaces of the great royal city of Hyderabad is the magnificent King Kothi Palace.

King Kothi Palace is a royal palace located in Hyderabad, India. It was the palace where the erstwhile ruler, the Seventh Nizam, Osman Ali Khan, Asaf Jah VII, of Hyderabad state lived here.
The palace was constructed by Kamal Khan, and sold to Nizam once he expressed his desire for the palace. The young Nizam moved in when he was only 13. After his accession to the throne in 1911, he continued to stay at the palace and did not move to Chowmahalla Palace where his father lived.

Initially, Kamal Khan constructed this palace for his personnel residence: Thus the palace main gate, passerby corridors, windows and doors were engraved with the sign of "K K". Later when Nizam purchased this palace, as it was a royal residence now, the young Nizam felt against his pride to have the abbreviations of other nawabs; he passed a ferman and changed the abbreviation "K K" to "King Kothi," meaning king's mansion. Thus the name King Kothi came into existence.

The King Kothi complex has various European styles. The canopies over windows, the intricate woodwork, the sloping tiled roofs in octagonal pyramid shapes of the Ghadial Gate complex, and the classical semicircular arches are among the characteristic features of King Kothi.
As mentioned earlier, the King Kothi Complex has remained in use for offices and Hospital.

Durga temple at Aihole

Durga temple at Aihole is an apsidal temple of about 550 A.D. in which the architect has made immense improvements upon his previous attempts. This temple is provided with a high pedestal, an open pillared verandah serving as pradakshanapatha, in place of a dark, ambulatory passage as in the case of the Ladkhan temple. Instead of perforated jallies is a pillared verandah running round the shrine, open, well ventilated and well lit. 

There is a high entrance with steps leading up to a tall base; the roof is almost double in height and in this particular case the turret is beginning to take the shape of a little spire, which, during the course of the next centuries; evolved into a towering Shikhara. The pillars would have looked very dull had they not provided an opportunity to the sculptors to carve with beautiful figures. Carving is also done under the row of pillars and for the first time we come across brackets supporting the beam of the roof across the wide opening of the temple. This again reminds us of the practice followed by the architect working in wood, who wanted to make either a house or a shrine by putting up pillars or posts of bamboo or wood on top of which he put horizontal beams so as to hold the roof. 

To make this construction doubly strong, he hit upon the 'idea of making brackets, an essential element in Hindu and Buddhist architecture in India and used much earlier in China; a slanting piece of stone emerging as it were from the pillars or posts, reaching out like an arm to hold the lintel or beam steadily. This kind of construction is known by the architectural term, trabeate, as distinct from accurate which was later made use of by the Muslims.