BAOLI
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बावड़ी BAOLI

BAOLI

बावड़ी · स्टेपवेल

What is real and what is not

We changed things.

The well is a scan of Toorji Ka Jhalra in Jodhpur, built in the 1740s by the queen consort of Maharaja Abhay Singh. The architecture you descended is really there — the flights on three sides, the pavilion wall, the jharokhas and the chhatris.

Almost nothing else is.

  • The shrineOurs. A separate temple model, placed in the water. There is no shrine at Toorji Ka Jhalra.
  • The lingamOurs. A third model, set on the sanctum floor.
  • The water levelChosen. Held at roughly two-thirds depth because it leaves the flights readable.
  • The stonePainted. The scan arrives untextured, so every colour is a shader — bleached at the rim, grimier with depth, algal at the waterline.
  • The desert and the duskOurs. The scan is a sectional model that ends in a slab.

Try it

The water was never in one place.

−12.6 m

Drag it. Every stepwell is designed around the fact that this line moves — the flights exist so the water is reachable at any of its heights.

Why stepwells stopped

A tap is faster than four hundred steps.

Across the twentieth century, piped supply and borewells made the walk unnecessary. Many stepwells silted up, were fenced off, or were filled in. The ones that survived largely did so as monuments rather than as infrastructure.

What was lost with them is harder to price: a cool public room in a hot city, open to anyone, that cost nothing to enter and did not belong to a household.

Colophon

How it is made.

  • RenderingThree.js (WebGL2), custom GLSL for sky, water and stone staining
  • ScrollLenis, driving a twelve-beat camera table
  • MotionWeb Animations API
  • AudioWeb Audio — flute bed through a depth-driven lowpass
  • TypeBodoni Moda · Archivo · Space Mono
  • BuildNone. ES modules, no bundler
  • WellToorji Ka Jhalra — Jodhpur, low-poly scan
  • ShrineIndian temples pack
  • LingamLingam Essence
  • LiliesOrigami water lilies
  • SoundKrishna flute, Krasnoshchok
  • Verificationpuppeteer-core — every frame in this build was screenshotted and jank-tested, not eyeballed

बावड़ी — built for the 3D Websites Hackathon.