Chandigarh Ahmedabad – Le Corbusier - Vereniging van ...

things, the fantastic Buland Darwaza at the entrance to Fatehpur Sikri. With these monumental, superscaled
spaces and volumes, le Corbusier (perhaps unconsciously) projects an ambiance conducive not to any Indian
sense of justice but to the Napoleonic code: that is, justice that is suprahuman, justice that is blind, justice that
is beyond the individual. Compare this with the decisions that the Emperor Akbar might have reached atop the
pillar in the centre of his Diwan-e-Am (also in Fatehpur Sikr) a small masterpiece, exquisitely scaled to human
dimensions. I am not saying that the justice of Akbar was preferable, only that it, like the code of Manu and the
wisdom of Solomon, sprang from a completely different set of instincts and mode of understanding, and that
architecture unconsciously and at a deep level, reflects these difference.
When we put aside the buildings of Chandigarh and examine its planning, the questions become even more
evident. Perhaps, as Sibyl Moholy-Nagy used to say, Le Corbusier was never really interested in urbanism.
He only tuned to it when he couldn't get enough commissions as an architect. Certainly Chandigarh, as a town
plan, never was the brave new world that Nehru presumed it to be. (Far from being a futuristic city, it isn't even
a contemporary one; it is positively feudal in its ironclad separation of rulers and ruled, in the caste-ridden
pattern of its sectors, and so forth. Most perplexing of all is its antic hierarchy of roadways, with V-1s and V-2s
intersecting along a grid every half mile or so. By 1950, anyone who had ever driven a car knew that wouldn't
make for speedy traffic. (But perhaps in Paris Le Corbusier took taxis?)
Even more serious was the low density of building adopted for the city, especially those sectors where the
richer people stay. Far from the kind of carpet housing so prevalent in Le Corbusier's beloved Greek islands
(and all over the villages and towns of India), Chandigarh exhibits the meaninglessly large plots found in the
military cantonments of the British Raj. These criminally low densities involve large per capita subsidies that
get progressively higher as a person rises in government! Worst of all, they make a viable public transport
system a near impossibility, so that in the middle of a scorchingly hot afternoon you will see hapless Indians
plodding along on foot or bicycle down mercilessly long straight roads, between brick walls to infinity.
But the 1950s must have been a very naïve time, and many of our planners took Chandigarh to be a portent
of the future, with the result that scores of new towns were built in its likeness. (One of them, Bhilai, houses
the biggest steel complex in India, built with Russian collaboration. When Khrushchev visited the town he
asked to see the chief planner. An Indian stepped forward proudly. 'In the USSR,' Krushchev said pleasantly,
'we would take you out and shoot you.') Like their prototype, all these new towns assume a middle class
pattern of living totally unrelated to the actual income profile of the population; thus many of the sectors in
Chandigarh have two or three families crowding into single dwelling units, and thousands of desperate
squatters have eked out miserable crevices for themselves all over the city.
For India is a poor country, and the human condition is brutal for more than half the inhabitants in our
spaceship Earth. These facts are palpable today; perhaps they were not so vivid 25 years ago. Or perhaps, as
was suggested earlier, Le Corbusier was not really a planner at all, but an architect manqué. When he was
given the twin assignment of planning the city and designing the Capitol Complex, he seems to have spent
minimal time on the former, modifying, only marginally, the plan prepared by Albert Mayer; the Capitol
Complex, on the other hand, demanded and obtained his most complete attention. He forthwith decoupled the
four buildings of the Capitol Complex from the city and placed them against the foothills of the Himalaya, thus
setting himself an intriguing architectural exercise, perhaps the most exquisite architectural exercise of all, one
that took him back to his student voyages to Greece and to the Acropolis of Athens.
The imbalance between the quality of effort brought to bear on the Capitol Complex and that on the town plan
as a whole was obviously Le Corbusier's own decision, taken by him unilaterally. And this brings us to a
crucial aspect of his influence, one that even now, 25 years later, is difficult to judge; it concerns the role of the
architect in society and his responsibility to the client. This is a question of fundamental importance in India
and, by extension, in most of the developing world as well.
Now, Le Corbusier always brought to bear the very highest intensity on his task as a designer. Despite certain
ambiguities in his writing (for instance, in The City of Tomorrow, in which he seems to be signaling his
availability to large-scale developers and "the captains of industry"!), he was never one to compromise his
design objective; never in that sense was he a gun for hire. For us in India in the mid-1950s, that itself was a
revelation. For, with one or two exceptions, the majority of architects we knew went about their business with
the most mundane objectives. Le Corbusier changed all that. He gave us a sense of the dimensions of history
and the kind of task -- and standards -- an architect could set himself. There is no lesson in architecture more
important than that.
Yet, it is precisely this search for excellence that can become a two-edged sword for it implies that you act
alone, independent of -- and often despite -- you client (not to mention the rest of society). The resultant
25 / 27