Place · modernist capitol complex · India
Chandigarh Capitol Complex
Le Corbusier's Capitol Complex for a state that had lost Lahore to Partition: the Secretariat, the Legislative Assembly and the High Court set around a plaza, in board-marked concrete, with the Open Hand and the Tower of Shadows between them. It was inscribed in 2016 as part of a transnational property covering his work in seven countries.
- Date
- 1952–1965
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 30.759, 76.809
Worth knowing
Nehru asked for something unfettered by the traditions of the past and got a European modernist's answer to that brief; the American planners Albert Mayer and Matthew Nowicki had drawn the first scheme, and Corbusier took over after Nowicki died in a plane crash in 1950. The plaza was never finished, and the Assembly's roof is shaped from a cooling-tower profile he saw at Ahmedabad.
Connections (6)
- Architectural modelJaipur walled city
Jaipur in 1727 and Chandigarh in 1951 are both planned on explicit theory — a nine-square shastraic grid in one case and Corbusier's sectors and hierarchy of roads in the other — and both were built for rulers who wanted a statement. Jaipur's grid has absorbed three centuries of use and still works; Chandigarh's sectors were designed around a car ownership India did not have, and its informal settlements sit where the plan has no room for them.
- PatronageJamsetji Tata
Jamsetji endowed what became the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore with most of his personal fortune in 1898, before any of his industrial ventures had paid, and negotiated for years with a reluctant colonial government and the Mysore state to get it established. It opened in 1909, five years after he died, and is still the country's leading research institution.
- Architectural modelLotus Temple, Delhi
The Lotus Temple and the Chandigarh Capitol are the two buildings by which post-independence India is most often represented abroad, and both were designed by foreigners — an Iranian Bahá'í and a Swiss-French modernist. One is a concrete assembly in raw geometry, the other a marble flower computed petal by petal, and both refuse every Indian architectural precedent on purpose.
- Alternative toVictorian Gothic & Art Deco, Mumbai
Chandigarh's Capitol Complex and Bombay's Victorian Gothic and Art Deco frontages are the two twentieth-century properties on this list, inscribed two years apart, and they are opposite cases. One is a single architect's work listed as part of a transnational serial property; the other is two generations of anonymous commercial and institutional building listed as an urban ensemble.
- Succession in timeNew Delhi, Lutyens' plan
New Delhi was finished in 1931 and Chandigarh begun in 1952, and the second is a deliberate answer to the first: no axis to a viceroy, no classical order, sectors instead of avenues, and a capitol set apart from the city rather than above it. Nehru asked for something unfettered by the traditions of the past, and got a European modernist's version of that.
- Monument within siteChandigarh
The Capitol Complex is the argument of the city made in concrete: the Secretariat, the Assembly and the High Court set apart at the head of the grid, with the Open Hand turning in the wind. It was inscribed by UNESCO in 2016 as part of Le Corbusier’s global ensemble — the only Indian entry in it — so the monument is world heritage while the city around it is still an ordinary working capital of two states.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Chandigarh Capitol Complex”. UNESCO nomination file for The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier (2016); Ravi Kalia, Chandigarh: The Making of an Indian City (1987).
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