Celebrating Chandigarh - flaws in Le Corbusier's design of government buildings in Chandigarh, India

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 1999 by Peter Davey

Chandigarh was where the Modern Movement came of age, and perhaps where a kind of Post-Modernism was born. Last month, a major international conference was held in the city at its half centennial to reassess its achievements and relevance for our times.

The President of India K. R. Narayanan, in one of the best speeches ever made about architecture by a head of state, called it a 'befitting capital ... where the mind is without fear and the head is held high'.

It was set in train by the independent government of India after the Punjab was rent in two by Partition. A new city was needed, not just as an administrative headquarters of a shattered province, but as a statement of the confidence of the nation in its future. Jawaharlal Nehru, first Prime Minister of India, asked the American firm Mayer, Whittlesey & Glass to produce a masterplan, but though the urban form owes much to their first drafts, the firm pulled out in 1950 when their young designer Matthew Nowicki died in an air crash.

Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew were asked to take on the task. With amazing selflessness, they recommended that Le Corbusier should be masterplanner. He was apparently quite reluctant to accept the commission (though this seems to be out of character in an architect who was prepared to creep for work to Mussolini and the Soviets). In the end, he adjusted the Mayer plan a little. He reserved for himself the great formal buildings for the secretariat, legislature and judiciary. India had adopted Montesquieu's idealized analysis of the British constitution as separation of powers, and the buildings had therefore to be completely distinct. But their distance apart was perhaps exaggerated. Georges Maurios, who was one of the young French architects in the design team, explained that an assistant had confused the Place de la Concorde and the Etoile in a specially drawn scale used by Corb to determine the distances between the buildings of the Capitol, the governmental area north of the main gridded structure of the new city. The result of the mis-measure is a vast and dusty plain which dwarfs individuals. There are photographs of the place being used as the world's largest cricket field, but now because of political tensions (not of course of Corb's making) the area is unused. The public is banned from it and the army occupies the fringes round the great buildings. It was amazing to learn that the Ditch of Contemplation, the public arena below the monument of the Open Hand, had never been used until we went there. But, if we were chilled to the bone in January, what can it be like in the heat of August?

Authoritarian, irrelevant and absurd as the Capitol sometimes seems, Chandigarh has a measure of nobility. The President believed that the city had provided India 'with an architecture for the modern age', born as it was 'in the exuberance of freedom and the tragedy of Partition'. There was nothing of the 'revivalism that characterized much Indian thinking of the period'. It is, he said, a place which had made Indians aware of the notion of citizenship: 'the best city in India, the cynosure of all'. Yet, 'there is no city planning that can face the reality of our society'. Is there, he asked, 'scope for filling Corbusier's masterplan with Laurie Baker's ideals?': the possibility of increasing the density of the grid with architecturally informed self-help housing is one of the ways in which the city might develop. Otherwise, it will expand into the surrounding farmland, and grow like a cancer. Even now, a fifth of its inhabitants are living desperately poor in scrubby tents and shacks on the periphery, far indeed from the ideal that the President quoted as the revolutionary standard of the city in which even the 'lowest government employee could have a house with two rooms, a flushing lavatory and access to amenities like schools'.

He called New Delhi 'an imperial city', but it was Romi Khosla who pointed out that Chandigarh is one as well. Nehru had the powers of the Viceroy, and the process of creation was virtually identical. Villages and communities were displaced by a Euclidean plan in a moment which was, Khosla suggested, the 'last in which our government forged links with the avantgarde'. In a passionate criticism of the whole idea, Madhu Sarin argued that the physical standards inherited from the improving British Garden Suburb ideal and the imperialist American City Beautiful movement 'became major instruments of exclusion - the delegitimization of the poor'. Why, she asked, 'is there so much in a planned city that does not fit?'.

Balkrishna Doshi (an alumnus of the Corbusier, Drew, Jeanneret office), Charles Correa and many others emphasized the vast importance that Corb's impact had on Indian architects of the immediate post-Independence period. They gained confidence, a notion that they could generate architectures for an independent culture, yet which could draw on tradition by abstraction.

The Capitol is flawed by the absurdity of gargantuan scale, daft indifference to function, and total ignorance of construction (Corb never seems to have heard of climate, or even of a drip, hence tremendous dilapidation). Yet the spaces inside the Capitol buildings have generosity, and the notion of a dignified res publica in a democratic society. Sadly, political developments have severed the buildings from the community.