A tribute to Le Corbusier and Chandigarh
By M.Bhavananda

To me as an architect, Le Corbusier was one of the greatest architects of 20th century.

His architectural concepts and styles had influenced me since my childhood days.
During my school days in Delhi, the hostellers were taken to different places of India during the autumn and winter breaks.
I came across to this city beautiful –Chandigarh in 1979, in one of our school trip to Kullu-Manali. I was totally fascinated by the brut concrete and exposed brickworks used at random and in total harmony with each other in all the super structures of the city beautiful. I was so impressed by the beauty and harmony in the architecture of Chandigarh that I ultimately became an admirer of Le Corbusier.

In the year 1984, I went to Ahmedabad to give entrance examination at the School of Architecture and also at the National School of Design. I was granted admission in the ‘School of Building Science and Technology’ at the School of Architecture and also got a call from the National School of Design but failed to get in to Architecture.

In SBST, where I had to spend one year, I was exposed to some of the great Indian architects like – B.V.Doshi (one of the close associates of Le Corbusier), Hasmukh Patel, Kirit Patel and academicians like -Prof. Thambe & Prof. Rangawala (who was an authority on building materials.) They were the faculty members of the institute.

In 1985, with SBST experience in hand, I ultimately achieved my goal in getting into architecture course at the ‘Chandigarh College of Architecture’and had ample opportunity to expose my self to the works of this great master. His work on architecture inspired me to go in depth to some of his master pieces in architecture.

When India got partitioned, Nehru wanted to build a new capital city for Punjab and show the world about the potentials of newly independent India. The work to design this city was first entrusted to Albert Mayer and Maphew Nowiski who later died in a plane crash and Albert Mayer pulled out from the project. Nehru entrusted the work to find a suitable architect for the Chandigarh project to Mr. P.L Varma, then Chief Engineer of Chandigarh and Mr. Thapar, then Secretary of Punjab.
Ultimately, Le Corbusier was commissioned to design Chandigarh in 1951. In this project, Le Corbusier was able to realize a long cherished dream, that of creating a complete city on virgin terrains, a hypothesis he had worked on as early as 1922 with his project for a contemporary city of 3 million inhabitants.
Created in between two seasonal rivulets, the Chandigarh plan was based on general theme of the functional city and its components of dwelling, work, transportation and recreation, the city’s specific image is drawn from a well ordered matrix of Le Corbusier’s generic sector and his 7V rules that was studied in 1950 at the UNESCO’s request and constituted a system like the circulatory and respiratory system of the human body.
The Sector is the container of the family life. The chosen dimensions which were the outcome of a valid and ancestral geometry established in past was hence forth adopted for the mechanical speed. The entrance of the cars in to the sectors can take place at on four points only. The sectors are thus surrounded by four wall bound car roads without openings. No house or building opens directly on the thoroughfare of rapid traffic.

Conceived as a self sufficient, completely introverted unit, the Chandigarh ‘sector’ was surrounded by the fast traffic V3s, linked to adjoining ones through its V4, “reassembling on a line the functions which are necessary to daily life(24 hours) - shopping , health care, and recreation. Vertical green belts, with pedestrian V7s, school and sports facilities, provided the same link in the opposite direction.

Connecting the various accents of the city – such as the Capitol (the ‘head’), the City Center (‘the heart’), the Industrial Area and the University (the two ’limbs’), and also scaling its seemingly undifferentiating matrix, were the city’s V2s-‘V2 Capitol,’ Jan Marg (Middle Avenue) linking the Railway Station to the University, and, the third V2, Dakshin Marg( South Avenue) demarcating the end of the city’s first phase.

The Capitol complex situated right at the head of the city with Shiwallik Hills at backdrop affords a unique architectural experience. There is tremendous juxtaposition of the Assembly and high court signifying that justice is independent of politicians. Another cynosure of the complex is the ‘Open hand’ which says, lets open to the world—let us give and let us take, is a masterpiece of art and an insignia of this city beautiful.

The green component of this city relies on a comprehensive plantation scheme, specifying tree-shapes to each category of avenues. The ‘Sukhna Lake’- sufficiently large to create the spectacle of the mountains and the sky reflected to the water- created to the east of the capitol by damming the fork of a seasonal rivulet was a sincere effort of this great master to relief the inhabitants of city from daily stress of urban life. The ‘Leisure Valley’ was fashioned as natural parkland out of 6Mts deep gorge meandering through the length of the city and over a period of time, it has become one of most prominent feature of the city.

This city has blossomed to become one of the finest urban design projects of the 20th century, attributing his ability to foresee everything and above all make allowances for the unforeseeable.
For Le Corbusier, a lifelong combat with architecture consisted in taking public imagination before doing so in the real world. The architect was everywhere on the communication front whether it may be in design or in words. A polemist by nature, he never hesitated in revealing his most bitter defeats, thereby transforming defeat in to victory. This adorable quality of this great master distinguishes himself from the rest. For him every project was an adventure, a challenge to be met and a new road to be mapped. From the beginning of his career his sole goal was to invent a new architecture. Thus each of his projects whether in urban planning projects like Chandigarh or architecture projects like Villa Savoye must have iconic status.
Between 1945 and 1965 Le Corbusier was to produce some ten icons which today constitute a prestigious evolution in architecture of the 20th century. 1945 onwards all projects were developed with modular scale, with range of harmonious measurements to suit the human scale. More than 60 years on, despite a wide diffusion in the world of architecture, its use remains marginal, yet this system still bears witness in the world of architecture.
If we look at the architecture produced today at the beginning of the 21st century, it is striking how much Le Corbusier’s works remain relevant, four decades after his death, in its extent of his formal investigation on elements of architecture. Most of the stylistic devices and elements which abound in today’s projects, whether they may be inbreeding of forms, the reference to the industrial aesthetics, work on monolithics, on the box under the parasol roof or on ruled surfaces, all had been experimented by this great master.

The author is an architect and promoter of Low-Cost housing and Solar Passive Architecture through Imphal West Building Centre at Imphal, India.