Slow Travel | In the vast Qutub Complex of Delhi, there stands a curious relic known as the Smith’s Folly. It’s one such piece of structure which would render itself obnoxious without its historical context. The Folly is a chhatri which Major Robert Smith of the British Indian Army added. The addition came in a moment of sympathetic genius by the Major after the original cupola was damaged in an earthquake. The chhatri looked so out of place at the top of Qutub Minar that Lord Hardinge—then the Governor-General, but who also enjoyed an infamous reputation otherwise—ordered for it to be removed at the first opportunity.
Today, the chhatri stands bearing the moniker of Smith’s Folly in the premises of the complex, removed from its original context and existing only as a mark of a misguided restoration on the part of the Major. However, one wonders: why Folly? While Robert Smith can conveniently explain that constructing a chhatri on top of the Qutub Minar, quite out of style with the whole edifice, was more or less a mad project, what can be said about the relation of madness and architecture in general?
Internationally, similar "madness" found grounds. Speaking on Paris’ Parc de la Villette, philosopher Jacques Derrida says that the follies—those seemingly purposeless, bright red structures designed by Bernard Tschumi—serve as provocations, questioning the very foundations of architecture and teasing out the unstable boundary between form and function, reason and madness.
For Derrida, these follies are not merely decorative anomalies but sites where architecture acknowledges its own "mad" underside, its excess, and its potential to rupture the rational order it so often claims to uphold.
He plays on the French phrase point de folie ("point of madness"), which simultaneously suggests the absence of madness and its precise emergence, using this ambiguity to propose that every architectural gesture contains within it a trace of the irrational—a moment where meaning and utility falter, giving way to play, desire and the poetic.
In this way, the Parc de la Villette becomes a space not only of movement and experience but also of philosophical reflection—where architecture turns back on itself and opens up to its own impossibility.
From the earliest times of the Greeks to the present day, there have been ruptures that make the idea of building only with a purpose fall through.
For instance, consider Seiryu Miharashi Station in Japan. Located on the Nishikigawa Seiryū Line in Yamaguchi Prefecture, this train stop has no entrances, no exits, no nearby village or road. You can’t get on or off there. You stop, you breathe, and the train carries on. It exists only for the view—a gentle invitation to stand still, gaze across the Nishiki River, and remember the feeling of fresh air on your face. It is a platform not of transit, but of presence. While it may be taken under the wing of Japan’s renowned "mindful architecture," it essentially comes as an architecture serving no tangible purpose.
To label it a folly would be both accurate and limiting. Like Smith’s misplaced chhatri or Tschumi’s red cubes, Seiryu Miharashi is a deliberate exercise in the unnecessary. But as history goes, things do not make themselves instantly accessible; it is now something rare and crucial in our age of acceleration: an architecture of slowness, of wonder.
If Seiryu Miharashi is architecture for stillness, then the Poets’ Cave of Tivoli in Italy is architecture for memory. In her work "The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses," Juhani Pallasmaa argues for an experience of architecture that can be had through touch, sound and memory, and pondering, instead of analytical vision and real estate. Such is the case of the Poets’ Cave, a natural grotto that was said to be sacred to the Muses, a retreat for poetic contemplation.
Later artists and Romantic writers, including Byron and Shelley, visited it as a kind of secular shrine to creative solitude. The cave, shrouded in ivy and echoing with water, offers no inscription or directive. It offers only an invitation to linger while also encouraging us to rally for more similar spaces around us—to sit in the hush and listen for the absence of purpose.
This lineage is far older than Derrida or Tschumi or Robert Smith. The ancient Greeks built temenoi—sacred enclosures for gods where one could not dwell or act but only contemplate. The Sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi was a terrain of thresholds, where pilgrims ascended through terraced walkways and ornamental treasuries, not to reach a destination, but to prepare to ask a question. The question was the journey. Psychologist Carl Jung likens this idea of temenos to the idea of a spellbinding "square space" designated for mental "work". In today's world, manifestations of such spaces can be seen in private reading, writing and meditative spaces.
In India, at the expense of a stretch, the stepwells of Gujarat and Rajasthan—most famously Chand Baori—were technically utilitarian structures, but their vertigo-inducing symmetry, their meditative descents into the earth, made them spaces of introspection. People would rest, pray, whisper, or simply watch the still water shimmer below. These were architectures of ritual slowness, built to be inhabited as much by silence as by human presence.
In Japan again, this idea is distilled further in the rock gardens of Zen temples like Ryoan-ji. Fifteen rocks arranged so that from any vantage point at least one disappears—kōan in stone.
There is no function here, only form. You do not walk in the garden. You sit, and the mind moves. It is essential to note that these are not useless spaces. They are spaces that defy usefulness as a criterion.
What unites all these structures—whether real, imagined, or misfired—is their resistance to the logic of economy and efficiency. They stand in opposition to the brutalism of today’s “anti-architecture,” where spikes line park benches to ward off the homeless, or trees are uprooted for glass towers that shimmer but do not breathe. In such a climate, the presence of an architectural excess—a station that leads nowhere, a chhatri that crowns nothing—feels quietly radical.
It is essential to note that these are not useless spaces. They are spaces that defy usefulness as a criterion.
The world is full of such utility-resistant spaces. In the forests near Kyoto, you might find Shokin-tei, a rustic teahouse in the Katsura Imperial Villa. It is smallish and hidden among the trees.
Designed during the Edo period, its muted walls and low entrance compel humility, built not to impress but to retreat—where one could perform chanoyu (tradition involving the ceremonial preparation and presentation of powdered green tea, or matcha) in near silence, attuned to the surrounding ecology.
In rural Spain, the Hermitage of San Baudelio de Berlanga in Soria rises negligibly, its interior frescoes faded. Once a retreat for solitary Christian monks, it stands almost invisible against the scrubland—its architecture a form of devotion. In Mexico’s Yucatán, sacred cenotes like Cenote Sagrado at Chichen Itza were not places to swim, but portals to the divine. The Maya believed these natural sinkholes were thresholds between worlds—sites of offerings and ritual, where one could speak to the gods or ask the Earth to respond.
To travel through these spaces is to travel differently. To cite these incidents is not to say that we go into mediation but bear testament to a time when introspection was a part of average everydayness; not to consume culture, but to sit within its quieter urges: to wonder, to gaze, to ponder.
To cite these incidents is not to say that we go into mediation but bear testament to a time when introspection was a part of average everydayness.
And perhaps this is why the term folly feels both unjust and perfect. It implies madness, but also whimsy. It is an architectural risk, a turning away from the grid and toward the sensible. And as Derrida reminds us, the madness of architecture is not a flaw—it is its secret soul. So, in the clamour of fast-paced life, let us keep these ghost stations and abandoned chhatris, these purposeless pavilions. Let us linger in their absurdities. For in a world obsessed with forward motion, to stand still—on a platform that leads nowhere—may be the most radical act of all.
