William J R Curtis on how India’s first planned city Chandigarh was born
Chandigarh was India's first planned city.
To understand Le Corbusier’s interpretation of Indian realities, both recent and more distant, it is necessary to consider the very raison d’être of the new city. Chandigarh was created out of the hopes, chaos and tragedy surrounding the Independence of India in 1947, and the subsequent Partition in 1948 which led to the creation of Pakistan.
The state of the Punjab was cut in two and the old capital of Lahore was left on the Pakistani side. Needed then was a city to house innumerable refugees, but also to supply an administrative head to the Indian Punjab and to anchor and stabilise a crucial part of northern Indian territory.
This emergency situation was translated into a major opportunity when Nehru understood that the new city could in turn become a show-piece of the newly independent nation. When Chandigarh was in construction, Nehru referred to it as a “temple of the new India… unfettered by tradition.” The entire mood of those times was to construct a better future and to forget years of colonial occupation which had often forced Indians to live in extremely cramped and unhygienic conditions in the old cities.
The themes of open space, greenery and light which were so dear to Le Corbusier, touched many chords with members of an elite whose values were to some degree ‘western’. Political independence for India permitted the planning of a national future but also a reassessment of the past. “She (India) is waking up… intact at a time when all is possible,” wrote Le Corbusier to Nehru: “But India is hardly a brand new country: it has lived through the highest and most ancient civilisations. It has an intelligence, moral philosophy and conscience of its own.”
India also happened to possess one of the greatest architectural heritages in world history, and of this too Le Corbusier was fully aware. This was another side of his task: to acknowledge India’s spiritual and artistic traditions but without lapsing into superficial imitation or orientalism. It was a question of probing Indian culture to its roots, its deeper patterns of myth and meaning, then transforming these substructures into modern symbolic forms.
The problem was not so foreign to an architect who had always linked authentic modernity to the radical reappraisal of the past. When Le Corbusier first came to India in 1951 he was quick to grasp these larger political agendas. He was also inspired by, even overwhelmed by, the selected site, a drainage plain containing several villages but with extraordinary views in the direction of the foothills of the Himalayas.
He realised that brick and reinforced concrete would be his most likely materials, especially given the abundance of clay and the indigenous expertise in concrete construction on the part of Indian engineers. He responded to the climate with its extreme heat and rains as a stimulus in finding an appropriate vocabulary. In his Indian sketchbooks he referred to deep loggias, verandas, shading devices, cross ventilation, plants and water.
The smaller commissions in Ahmedabad (Sarabhai House, Millowner’s Association Building, Shodhan House, etc.) were like laboratories. He soon established the basic ‘key’ or ‘genotype’ for his Indian works: the ‘parasol’, an overhanging, protective roof held up on slender supports, providing shelter from the sun and the rain, but also providing cross ventilation underneath through sun shading blades or brisesoleil (sunbreakers).
In effect the parasol was a transformation of the topmost slab of the Dom-Ino skeleton, although there was the intervening discovery of the shading roof of the Maison Baizeau in Tunis of 1928. Variations on the ‘parasol theme’ can be found in all of the main buildings on the Capitol in Chandigarh.
The Capitol is the symbolic ‘head’ of Chandigarh, a city which suggests an abstraction of the body with the ‘spine’ of the main axial road and the ‘arms’ of the main transversal one. On the Capitol the buildings are sensed in an everchanging dialogue of spatial relationships and framed views.
Le Corbusier set them far apart so that justice could be independent of the parliament and the executive (and vice-versa) in a graphic demonstration of the balance of powers. His spatial conception of a shared landscape also had to do with openness, the opposite of tyranny.
He established some of the terms of a ‘democratic monumentality’ expressing the e strength of institutions of state, but avoiding authoritarian oppressiveness. The buildings are rarely perceived as frontal forms and seen on the diagonal deflect the eye in a perspective towards the surroundings.
The naked concrete forms dramatised by light and gashed by shade have an ancient feeling and yet these masses seem to float in space. They combine a brute directness with a refined, linear sense in their profiles.