Chandigarh: Where Modernism Met India

04/04/201704/04/2017 Jared Green

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Chandigarh Revealed / Princeton Architectural Press

Chandigarh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandigarh), the capital city of the Indian states of Haryana and Punjab, was
planned and designed in the 1950s and 60s by French-Swiss master architect Le Corbusier
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier), along with architects Jane Drew, Pierre Jeanneret, and Maxwell Fry, and a
host of Indian modernists. Envisioned by Indias founding prime minister Jawahar Lal Nehru, the planned city
represented a break with Indias colonial past and embodied a distinctly-Indian form of modernism, rooted in post-
independence values of democracy, socialism, secularism, and non-alignment (http://www.frontline.in/cover-story/a-
vision-for-india/article6629812.ece). The city, and other planned modernist cities of the era, told the world India was
on its way.

First planned and designed to accommodate some 500,000 people, today, more than a million people live in
Chandigarh, as the city has expanded, and slums have taken over areas where the plan was never fully realized. Some
50 years later, Le Corbusier and Nehrus city appears both glorious and derelict, visionary and an anachronism in
Chandigarh Revealed (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1616895810/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?
ie=UTF8&tag=a04806-
20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1616895810&linkId=9233c4bab3b12677ff4cca1d39375853)
a fascinating new book by photographer and designer Shaun Flynn.

Chandigarh has been likened to Brasilia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bras%C3%ADlia), the modernist capital city of
Brazil planned and designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer. But whereas Brasilia hosts workers during the day and expels
them at night, Chandigarh was designed to be a more livable city full-time, with a primary Capitol complex, and its
Legislative Assembly as the focus; commercial districts; parks and plazas; educational, medical, and research
institutions; and housing for tens of thousands of government workers.
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Chandigarh legislative assembly / Images Shaun Fynn, from
Candigarh Revealed: Le Corbusiers City Today by Shaun Fynn
published by Princeton Architectural Press (2017)
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Chandigarh legislative assembly interior / Images Shaun Fynn,
from Candigarh Revealed: Le Corbusiers City Today by Shaun Fynn
published by Princeton Architectural Press (2017)

Chandigarhs plan is divided into 47 sectors, each 800 by 1,200 meters. Sectors 1-30 were created from 1951-1976,
and sectors 31-57 were created from the 1960-1985. Until his death in 1965, Le Corbusier was still designing elements
of the site. Flynns well-designed infographics really help explain his vision.

Flynn describes in his introduction how government housing is further broken into fourteen categories, each with
variations, and all built according to a hierarchy based on socioeconomic status.

The most desirable and lowest-density area are sectors 2-9, which are adjacent to the Capitol complex, while
population density increases as the sectors recede from the mountains, the Capitol complex, and Sukhna Lake. Even
in the planned city, its all about location in this case, the proximity to power.

But all buildings were made to a consistent level of quality and with the same attention to detail. Constructed out of
concrete and brick, the most cost-effective and freely available local material, the buildings were designed to nest
together into a broader plan. And even the smallest apartments the minimum being 100 square meters were
designed by an architect with care, writes M.N. Sharma, an associate of Le Corbusier and chief architect of Chandigarh
from 1965-1979.

According to numerous reports and surveys (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandigarh), the city today has one of the
happiest and wealthiest populations in all of India, and the city itself is one of the cleanest. These achievements may be
seen as a testament to the legacy of Nehru, Le Corbusier, and his colleagues.

But the state of ruin of many of the buildings can also be seen as a commentary on the lack of progress towards
Nehrus vision of a fully-modern India, with strong, centralized, and efficient government.

Architect Vikramaditya Prakash, who grew up in Chandigarh, writes in his essay about the complexities found in
Chandigarh. By the 1970s, the vision of efficient government as embodied in the Capitol complex had died amid the
daily disintegration of the failing Nehruvian nation-state, and as endemic corruption, unemployment, and the bloated
lethargy of the public sector slowly drained the lifeblood of the nation.
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Chandigarh / Images Shaun Fynn, from Candigarh Revealed: Le
Corbusiers City Today by Shaun Fynn published by Princeton
Architectural Press (2017)

However, in the midst of this national deterioration, Chandigarh paradoxically prospered. He writes: As the rest of
the cities of northern India descended into urban miasma, Chandigarh became a haven for the Punjabi elite because
the city, particularly as its tree cover matured, offered an unparalleled quality of life.

Flynn argues there is another narrative on Chandigarh worth exploring: planning, architecture, and nature. Le
Corbusier focused on the care of the mind and body, which is reflected in not only the buildings, which are rich with
Le Corbusiers symbols and native religious forms, but also in the landscape.
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Le Corbusiers hand symbol on a building / Images Shaun Fynn,
from Candigarh Revealed: Le Corbusiers City Today by Shaun Fynn
published by Princeton Architectural Press (2017)

In his edict, Le Corbusier writes: The city of Chandigarh is planned to human scale. It puts us in touch with the infinite
cosmos and nature. It provides us with places and buildings for all human activities by which the citizens can live a full
and harmonious life. Here the radiance of nature and heart are within our reach.
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Nature and architecture intermingle at Chandigarh / Images Shaun
Fynn, from Candigarh Revealed: Le Corbusiers City Today by Shaun
Fynn published by Princeton Architectural Press (2017)

In a transcript of an interview, Sharma concurs, arguing that to take care of your mind and body, you need recreation
so this is a city with open spaces. Old people can walk, children can run around, and then there are paths that are very
peaceful. There are also large-scale gardens that many people thought were for the rich, and I told them, no, the Rose
Garden is meant for poor people.

Modernist planning and architecture comes together with parks and tree-lined streets to create a livable Modernism, a
garden city for Indians.

From the book, however, its unclear how much of Chandigarhs interesting landscape came from the original designers
and how much accrued as new layers later.

Also, while Flynn shoots the buildings designed by Le Corbusier, Jeanneret, Drew, and Fry in a compelling way giving
us a real sense of what its like to be in these buildings, walk around them, or even be on top of them he only gives
us glimpses of civic and green spaces, and offers no photographs of people out enjoying the communitys tree-covered
streets, parks, the celebrated Zakir Hussein Rose Garden (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zakir_Hussain_Rose_Garden),
or the Rock Garden (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Garden_of_Chandigarh), which is estimated to have received
some 12 million visitors.
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Chandigarh rose garden / Wikipedia

Examining Flynns photographs, one must often look around the corners of buildings and imagine what these
landscapes are like in totality.
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View of Le Corbusiers museum / Images Shaun Fynn, from
Candigarh Revealed: Le Corbusiers City Today by Shaun Fynn
published by Princeton Architectural Press (2017)

Le Corbusier was very focused on how buildings and nature must relate. In this book, one hopes for a clearer view of
that central relationship.

Cities, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces

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