Chandigarh, fragments of a modernist utopia by Roberto Conte

Project description by Roberto Conte

The partition of the Punjab area, in 1947, assigned the ancient Lahore to Pakistan, leaving the Indian side devoid of an important urban and administrative center. A new city was therefore needed both to serve as the capital for both the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana and to be able to demonstrate the capabilities, the dynamism and the modernity of the new India ruled by Jawaharlal Nehru. This city was Chandigarh, one of the most iconic places in the history of modernist architecture.

The Indian authorities initially called the American planner Albert Mayer and the Polish architect Maciej Nowicki (that worked to a project influenced by the garden cities, later set aside after the premature death of Nowicki), followed by a team led by Le Corbusier that included his cousin, Pierre Janneret, and the couple of British architects Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew (who worked on the project for three years). Pierre Jeanneret, in particular, was involved very much in the assignment, dedicating almost completely the rest of his life to it, so much so that he asked to disperse his ashes in the local Lake Sukhna.

A very important and not always remembered thing is that many Indian colleagues joined the group of western architects.  The Indian authorities specifically requested in the contract that the Europeans should have moved to the place where Chandigarh would have arisen for the period of their assignment (a condition from which only Le Corbusier was exempted). The Indians correctly considered the genesis of the city as an extraordinary training opportunity for a new generation of local architects who could have continued the work independently.

Chandigarh is characterized by a hierarchical division of the urban functions, established on a grid made up of fast-traffic roads that separate, in a remarkable way, different sectors of similar dimensions. Within these, the individual architectural components still represent distinctive characteristics that identify - almost as a "sector landmark” - the distinctive features of the individual areas (residential, recreational, commercial, institutional or academic).

Therefore, next to the famous and outstanding Capitol Complex by Le Corbusier, the exploration of Chandigarh unveils a very large number of modernist structures, often almost forgotten even ifsurprising, in made by European or Indian authors. Next to recurring details throughout the city, such as reinforced concrete balustrades with empty spaces between the pillars (later filled by bricks or iron element for apparent safety reasons), it’s possible to find absolutely unique architectural objects, such as the tower of the Student Center University of Panjab, the ramp of a suburban stadium, different housing solutions or the Gandhi Bhawan of Pierre Jeanneret and many others.

Decades after its construction, the debate on the effects of the urban model adopted in Chandigarh is still open, but the different projects that were realized are still able to stimulate a lot of interest, both architectural and visual, and still allow to get the peculiar and unique charm felt by Pierre Jeanneret himself.