Fate seems like an odd word when mentioning the illustrious Le Corbusier. However, it was a curious and tragic twist of fate that got him the commission of a lifetime; his one and only chance to fulfill his lifelong desire to craft a new city from ground zero. Something he craved all his life.
When I went to work in Chandigarh, India and asked the young folks who came for interviews for an IT job if they knew who Corbusier was, they looked lost. A bright young one asked, “Is that an algorithm, Ma’am?”
I didn’t know then the significance of Chandigarh to Corbusier’s career. I had driven around the city as a newcomer and seen those (to me they looked strange) gray and rectangular buildings with pigeon-holed, latticed exterior. Ribbons of cement shutters on house exteriors. An architect friend of mine, explained, “Those are the brise-soleil – Corbusier’s hallmark sun shading and air circulation devices.”
“Why do all the buildings look so rough and gray?” I asked.
My friend laughed, “That is Corbusier for you, rustic simplicity and scientific living space. That is his brand of modernism. These buildings are mostly made from rough concrete -Béton brut . Brutalism in architecture. You see austere, he saw strength, solidity, absence of excess.”
Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French master of modernistic architecture evangelized his own brand of urban planning throughout his career. One of the most influential architects of the 20th century, his defining identity was his almost missionary advocacy of his vision of architectural modernism.
Corbusier saw the world and living space as a canvas to build his model urban habitats; transformative, breaking from past traditions. He envisioned futuristic cities, theorized fervently about urban plans for such modern cities, to be engineered with his tenets of perfection in the machinist age. He applied his formula all over the world, designing landmark buildings. His 1922 project – Villa Contemporaine, proposed demolishing parts of Paris to give way to a cluster of skyscrapers. The project of course remained unrealized but earned him the tag of a self-obsessed designer.
Despite the fame and prodigious theories he produced, he never had a chance to build a city of his own – ground up.
Then Chandigarh happened.
Erecting a new capital for Punjab was a national quest to celebrate a new era. The partition of India in 1947 tore the country apart and Lahore the capital of Punjab, the state in the northwest of India, went to Pakistan. A new capital was sought. Not just a new city but also a symbol to showcase a nation’s infant independence from long colonial subjugation. A city to break from the past, to get the ball rolling towards In Nehru’s words, “an expression of the nation’s faith in the future.”
A tricky and tall order. But the project was not Corbusier’s. The Indian government chose the American architects and urban planners – Albert Mayer and Matthew Nowicki. Mayer already had a presence in India as an urban planner. They undertook the project and work began in 1950. A master plan was produced by them. A plan to develop a city based on superblocks with encircling green belts, neighborhoods as micro-habitats – a plan that was largely adopted by Corbusier later. Nowicki was appointed the Chief Architect of the Chandigarh project. In the fall of 1950 he finished a good deal of work in Chandigarh and got on a TWA jet to return to America. The jet crashed somewhere over the Libyan desert. Mayer did not want to continue after the death of his partner. And the project went to Corbusier.
A man in his mid-sixties and without a fructified version of his grand theories, Corbusier couldn’t have asked for a better gift. To craft a city from scratch on the open plains of Punjab, in the lap of the gray-blue Himalayan ranges, hugged by seasonal rivulets. A perfect place to build his urban utopia. In rapturous tones he described the magnificent land upon arrival –“ We’re on the site of our city absorbed by the poetry of natural things and by poetry itself….under a splendid sky, in the midst of a timeless countryside…”
Corbusier arrived in Punjab in 1950 with a commission to build the city of Chandigarh. A dream of a lifetime, and now a reality. A Calvinist by faith, did he feel God’s fingers moving when the Indian officials showed up in his Paris office with the proposal? Did he say a prayer? Did he shout the French equivalent of “Yes, Yes, Yes!”
Le Corbusier began the project with a stellar team and the city was inaugurated in 1953.
Read more about Le Corbusier
https://mitp-arch.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/lpiv36vr/release/1
https://thespaces.com/explore-le-corbusiers-modernist-metropolis-chandigarh/
1 comment
An informative and well written homage to a genius, an architect of the UN headquarters in New York, whose magnificent work in Punjab is too often unacknowledged!