DakshinaChitra Museum

DakshinaChitra was created by the Madras Craft Foundation under the American-born cultural activist Deborah Thiagarajan, who founded the organisation in 1984 to preserve the art, architecture, crafts and performing arts of South India. Opened in 1996 on a site at Muttukadu on the East Coast Road south of Chennai, it took shape as a living-heritage village, and grew into one of India's foremost centres for the presentation of vernacular architecture and intangible culture, a model widely admired and imitated.

DakshinaChitra occupies a ten-acre coastal site at Muttukadu, conceived as a heritage village of authentic historic houses relocated from across the four southern states. Eighteen traditional homes from Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, given for demolition, were carefully dismantled and rebuilt on site, complete with their courtyards, crafts and contexts, and set among craft workshops, performance spaces and galleries, so that the architecture itself is the primary exhibit.