Amid chaos of India, Chandigarh a ‘city beautiful’
The planned metropolis is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site attracting urban designers
CHANDIGARH, INDIA— It’s the last thing we expected to find in often-chaotic India: a planned city of green spaces and 1950sfuturistic concrete buildings designed by legendary Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier.
Commissioned by India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to be a showplace capital in northern India following the1947 partition, Chandigarh is suddenly a hot destination for architects and urban designers. Fans of Le Corbusier’s geometric, unadorned style marked with bold splashes of colour can walk around a living museum in this Indian city.
You don’t need to be a design nerd to appreciate Chandigarh, located about 260 kilometres north of New Delhi. In peril due to the elements, neglect and theft of historic objects, “the city beautiful” was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site last year, which may help save it.
Chandigarh recently began free walking tours three times daily around the Capitol Complex in Sector 1, where many of the Le Corbusier architectural treasures are centred. As the Tel Aviv honeymooner on our tour explained, he’d long wanted to get here, seeing it as a way to balance “planned vs. unplanned India.”
Le Corbusier described Chandigarh, which was broken into 65 compact sectors, as being planned to human scale. “It puts us in touch with the infinite cosmos and nature.”
The Sector 1 tour was about an hour, focusing on the plaza that includes Le Corbusier’s symbol for the city, the Open Hand monument (the area was under renovation). We couldn’t get inside the High Court or Palace of Assembly with its swooping roof because these are working government buildings, but we were able to get to the top of the Secretariat building to look over the square, which includes the Tower of Shadows, an open building made of concrete platforms.
We were warned not to take photos inside the Secretariat, which seemed frozen in time, with inspirational sayings mounted on the rough concrete walls.
If modernism isn’t your cup of tea, check out Nek Chand Rock Garden, also in Sector 1, a mind-blowing array of 2,000 whimsical sculptures over 10 hectares from dancing girls to fantasy animals and art installations including whirling mosaics, a massive waterfall and thematic walls of electrical switches and pottery fragments.
It’s all made from discarded bits and pieces gathered by civil servant Nek Chand starting in 1957. He worked in secrecy at night to create this found-art park from demolition waste.
Once dismissed as a crank, officials initially wanted to raze the place. Now Chand is a national hero, heralded as a creative force. The Nek Chand Foundation website calls it “the greatest artistic achievement seen in India since the Taj Mahal.”
We could have stayed there much longer, but we wanted to include a stop at Le Corbusier Centre in the Old Architects Office Building in Sector 19, a small but significant display of furniture designed by Le Corbusier’s cousin, Pierre Jeanneret (Le Corbusier’s real name was Charles-Édouard Jeanneret), along with original architectural drawings, letters, maps and posters.
We’d heard there was a newly opened Pierre Jeanneret museum, but none of the Chandigarh officials knew much about it. An accidental meeting with a French tourist revealed the designer’s former house had opened as a museum the day before. The modern red-andwhite home is an excellent example of period design and contains drawings, letters and photographs. Linda Barnard was hosted by Abercrombie & Kent Luxury Tailor Made Travel and Oberoi Hotels & Resorts, which did not review or approve this story.