Imperial dominance in Asia enabled European engineers and architects to exercise their technical expertise in some of the most extensive and audacious building projects of the modem era. However, coveted colonial possessions such as British India were also highly constrained spaces of opportunity in which the notion of 'progress' was engaged in a politically delicate dialectic, not only with the colonised societies, but also within the polyvalent structures of the colonial technocracies themselves. This paper examines this latter institutional level of technical reasoning and agency in the particular case of the official building practices of British India. Within this closed system of colonial spatial production, I argue, even the most prosaic of innovations in building form or methods were potentially counter-productive to the peculiar project of colonialmodernity. How the analysis of such design issues arises from and contributes to a wider field of current historical and critical inquiry concerning colonialmodernity is the question with which I begin.