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About Chandigarh buildings
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Authorship and modernityin Chandigarh: the Ghandi Bhavanand the Kiran Cinema designed byPierre Jeanneret and EdwinMaxwell Fry
Iain Jackson, SoumyenBandyopadhyay
The Liverpool School of Architecture, University of
Liverpool, Abercromby Square, Liverpool, L69 7ZN,
UK;Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
The Modernist city of Chandigarh was designed as a result of the 1948 Partition of India.
After the initial appointment of Albert Mayer as lead architect and planner, Le Corbusier
along with Pierre Jeanneret, Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew were selected. Whilst Le
Corbusier’s work in Chandigarh is relatively well known, the work of the other three
European architects has not received the same degree of attention. The aim of this paper
is to consider two prominent buildings, one designed by Jeanneret for Panjab University
and the other a cinema hall designed by Maxwell Fry. Fry’s cinema was one of the first
non-residential buildings to be constructed in the city and presents an inoffensive, even sym-
pathetic ‘established modernity’. Jeanneret’s building, designed almost ten years later,
begins to mark a shift from, even a rejection of the ‘stark brutality’ of the city towards an
expressive formalism, drawing from different historical sources to those found in Le Corbu-
sier’s work in nearby Sector-1. These buildings, it will be argued, represent key moments in
the history of the city and indeed the development of modernism and the avant-garde.
Setting the scene: Le Corbusier and the other
European architects of Chandigarh
The history, or rather a particular history of Chandi-
garh, India, has been extensively told and retold,
beginning with the partition of India in 1948 and
the search for a new Punjabi Capital. The aim of
this paper is to discuss two of the lesser-known
architectural contributors to the city, Edwin
Maxwell Fry and Pierre Jeanneret, and in particular
two buildings they designed in Chandigarh. The
building by Fry is a cinema hall completed in 1956,
and the Ghandi Bhavan (a Ghandian philosophy
school) by Jeanneret was completed a decade later
in 1966.1 Housing was the main concern of both
architects in Chandigarh, but it is through the
limited number of civic and public commissions
that a more experimental and expressive architec-
ture is revealed.
The authorship of Chandigarh is generally associ-
ated only with Le Corbusier. Whilst he was respon-
sible for the master planning and the design of
several government structures, there are many
other significant ‘authors’ and ‘designers’ whose
contributions have received little discussion to
date. In addition to Le Corbusier and the aforemen-
tioned Pierre Jeanneret and Edwin Maxwell Fry there
was also Jane Drew, yet the city remains, certainly in
print, characterised as a Corbusian scheme.
Evenson provided an early, essential documen-
tation of the city whilst it was still under construction
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The Journal
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# 2009 The Journal of Architecture 1360-2365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360903358011
and largely ‘untested’ by any inhabitants.2 She
included the contributions of the extended design
team, but the Sector-1 buildings designed by Le
Corbusier received the most attention. This pre-
cedent has continued; however, recent literature
has broadened to include other architects.
Kalia’s extensive history of Chandigarh introduces
many of these other creative participants3 and more
recently Kiran Joshi devoted volume 1 of the ency-
clopaedic Documenting Chandigarh series to the
contributions of Pierre Jeanneret, Edwin Maxwell
Fry and Jane Drew.4 Perera takes a more critical
approach in discussing the planning of the city and
challenges the misconception of Le Corbusier as
the sole heroic planner.5 He asserts that the planning
of the city was more of a hybrid solution (a claim
bolstered by Kapur6), inherited from the American
architect, Albert Mayer and the Indian Engineer,
P.L. Varma, rather than solely Le Corbusier’s.
There have been other works that discuss
additional Chandigarh ‘authors’, such as the
seminal research by Madhu Sarin on illegal settle-
ments and the inadequacies of the plan to the
accommodation of essential labourers.7 Other
additions to the Chandigarh plan, such as Nek
Chand’s Rock Garden, have also begun to receive
academic attention,8 further contributing to a
fuller understanding of this unpredictable ‘living
experiment in the field of contemporary planning
and architecture’.9 Sarin’s work marks a decisive
moment and the quality of Chandigarh was assessed
not only for its architectural merits, but also for its
practicality. Le Corbusier’s contribution began to
receive a more critical appraisal as did the wider
conception of Chandigarh. The discussions on
Chandigarh and Le Corbusier became polarised. It
was adored by visiting architects and indeed by
most of the residents, and yet despised by visitors
from the West as a clinical and abstract imposition
on the people of India.10 In praise of the city there
are the more familiar architectural monographs
focused, for the most part, on Le Corbusier.11
Most of the authors discussed above, plus many
other designers, architects, academics, activists
and writers attended a conference in Chandigarh
in 1999, to commemorate the city’s first fifty
years. The discussions ranged from the anecdotal
and sentimental through to proposals for redesign-
ing Sector-1: the extensive proceedings were pub-
lished in 2002.12 The Conference constituted a
closing chapter on the discussions and debates
surrounding Chandigarh with all parties present to
voice and to respond to concerns, although the
verbose commentaries had little real impact.
It is only recently that more critical research has
taken place that does not seek to moralise and to
question the procurement of the city, but looks
more towards understanding Chandigarh’s position
within the cultural weave of a post-colonial
nation.13 Prakash in particular begins to discuss
the position of Chandigarh and Le Corbusier’s
approach from a post-colonial perspective as well
as invoking the shift in ‘modernism’ towards an
historicised formalism. A position reinforced
through Le Corbusier’s decision to allow the village
of Kansal to remain near the Sector-1 buildings
whilst all other villages were demolished to make
way for the new city.14
Beyond these influential works there remain
substantial gaps with regard to the specific
688
Authorship and modernity in
Chandigarh: Pierre Jeanneret and
Edwin Maxwell Fry
Iain Jackson, Soumyen Bandyopadhyay
interpretation of key buildings designed by the other
members of the design team. The city is treated as a
single entity rather than as a collection of individu-
ally designed buildings. These structures (along
with Louis Kahn’s in Ahmedabad) set a
particular course for Modern architecture within
India, directly influencing the first generation of
post-independence Indian architects15 as well as
forming a new aesthetic and taste upon which
subsequent works would be judged.16
This broad and far-reaching topic requires con-
siderable research. A study of Modernist architec-
ture produced throughout the Subcontinent
during the first thirty years following Independence
will be the focus of future study, building on
the work of Bahga and Bahga, and Lang, Desai,
et al. 17 In addition, the work of Fry will also be
the subject of future research drawing on the
extensive archives of the RIBA.
The City of Chandigarh
Chandigarh is located in Punjab, Northern India and
was created following the Act of Partition in 1948
when India lost the city of Lahore to Pakistan
(Fig. 1). The city is laid out on a grid-plan composed
of ‘Sectors’ most of which are 1200 m � 800 m and
is arranged according to the ‘four functions’ of the
CIAM ‘charter of Athens’. In order to construct
the city approximately twenty-four villages were
destroyed (Fig. 2). The first Sector contains the
government buildings and runs along the northern
edge of the city. Running centrally down the plan is
the ‘leisure valley’, a green space for exercise and
relaxation. Le Corbusier wrote a document called
the ‘Statue of the Land’, which contains all the
planning and architectural rules that the city was to
be governed by, as summarised in the City Edict.18
The aim was to create a city, ‘offering all amenities
of life to the poorest of the poor of its citizens to lead a
dignified life’.19 Despite these zealous attempts and
legislation to control the aesthetics and ‘harmony’
of the city there have been many transgressions,
not least by government. In recent times, the chief
architects have become more liberal towards the
personalisation of property and the notion that not
everyone wants to live in Modernist villas (Fig. 3).20
Architectural hierarchy or remote
collaboration: the quest for recognition
Before the Indian representatives approached Le
Corbusier they visited Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew
in London. Had the pair been able to ‘drop every
Figure 1. Location of
Chandigarh within the
Indian Subcontinent.
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other obligation and accept the appointments,
Corbusier would not have been approached’.21
Drew was ‘foremost in urging acceptance’ of the
commission and suggested that Le Corbusier
should also join the design team; however, Fry saw
the collaboration with Le Corbusier as an ‘unpredict-
able portion of misery for me’.22 In his writings Fry
appears as a reluctant participant, handing in his
Figure 2. Plan of
Chandigarh and the
destroyed villages,
erased to make way for
the new capital.
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Authorship and modernity in
Chandigarh: Pierre Jeanneret and
Edwin Maxwell Fry
Iain Jackson, Soumyen Bandyopadhyay
notice on at least one occasion whilst in India over
difficulties with the ‘evasive and autocratic’ Chief
Engineer, Varma, and ‘neglect’ from the Administra-
tor, Thapar. He also had the appointment contract
re-drawn so that ‘we [ie, the architects] would not
work under engineers’.23 Upon the first meeting
with Le Corbusier in India, Fry explained the design
process as a ‘difficult situation. My French was
unequal to the occasion. Jeanneret was super-
numerary, and Thapar only half aware of what
was going forward. Corbusier held the crayon and
was in his element’.24 He goes on to describe Jean-
neret as ‘not the happiest of collaborators, but a
ceaseless worker in the good cause’.25
For Maxwell Fry, the enterprise with Le Corbusier
and Jeannerret was to be communal and collabora-
tive, but this was, of course, not how Le Corbusier
saw things. Fry rebelled, citing the CIAM notion of
the ‘spirit of teamship’ in a letter during May,
1951. He writes that he was ‘shocked’ by Le
Figure 3. A Rejection of
the city edict and the
adoption of Greek
revival.
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Corbusier’s direction and, again implying that he
may leave the project, ‘if we are to continue
together, I would like to discuss the basis of collab-
oration which will satisfy us. . ...there is no reason
why a group of buildings should not be designed
by a group of CIAM architects, but I am opposed
to the idea of designing individual buildings in a
group or of merely carrying out your designs’.26
Le Corbusier replied describing Fry’s letter as
‘impolite’, but conceded that Fry could design
what he liked and suggested drawing up an a-z
inventory of buildings so that they could select
commissions.
It was eventually decided by the four architects
that the broad plan would remain and that Le Cor-
busier should concentrate on the major adminis-
tration buildings (working from Paris) leaving the
majority of the city sectors to the other three archi-
tects (working from Chandigarh and individually).
Whilst the notion of teamwork and collaboration
was theoretically part of the CIAM agenda, in
reality activities were highly individualistic. For
Drew this affected the unity of the city design:
‘one of the failings of Sector-22 is that the housing
has been designed by three architects and there is
some diversity of experience, each architect having
a different sense of space and order’.27 She goes
on to conclude that it might have been better to
vary the architect for each sector but not within
any one sector.
Sector-22: City Prototype, Maxwell Fry
and Drew
Sector-22, located one block south of the main
commercial and shopping district (Sector-17), was
the first sector to be built. It was largely designed
by Jane Drew and was to be a mixed-use high-
density sector with shops, market, housing,
schools, health facilities and public squares
(Fig. 4).28 Its northern edge faces onto the bus ter-
minus in Sector-17 making it a key entrance point
to the city, having one of the highest population
densities.29 The sector has an internal figure-of-
eight road (a V5) and faces inwards from the
main traffic roads that enclose it (V3s).30 Drew’s
aim was to provide lots of green space for families
and a centralised hub containing the market. The
large population and the early construction of
this sector established it as ‘subsidiary to the
town centre’.31 In addition to the housing, a
‘bazaar street’ runs centrally through the sector
along the east-west axis, ‘the bigger shops and
cinema are grouped to form a piazza off which
come the tiny traditional bazaar streets’.32 The
cinema mentioned by Drew was designed by
Maxwell Fry, and is the only such structure
outside of Sector-17.
The area and cost of the housing design was
linked to civil service rank and respective salary:
‘this new economic basis of neighbourhoods,
reflecting a vigorous hierarchy of the civil service,
has created a new equally formidable, “caste
system”. Thirteen categories of government
housing were designed. . .each corresponding to a
rank in the government bureaucracy’.33 This was a
system that grouped different social groups
together, their only common relationship being
their salaries. Secondary to socio-economic status
were materials and climate: however, Fry claimed
that ‘climate has been the determining factor in
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Authorship and modernity in
Chandigarh: Pierre Jeanneret and
Edwin Maxwell Fry
Iain Jackson, Soumyen Bandyopadhyay
Chandigarh architecture, and so it should be. There
can be no surer way to a suitable architecture, and
one that is in accord with the deepest realities of
the country; for it is climate that dictates agriculture,
moulds customs and affects even religion. Climate is
a great element in India’(Fig. 5).34
Figure 4. Plan of
Sector-22.
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The Kiran Cinema: providing glamour
in Sector-22
The front elevation of the cinema is the most
dominant, and the building is not really to be
experienced or viewed from any other angle. The
facade acts almost like a cinema screen, facing
onto its public audience: the shops and car park.
The material palette of the sector is largely brick
with concrete frames, against which the rendered
concrete facade and green ceramic cladding of
the cinema is in stark contrast (Fig. 6). Fry
enjoyed the ‘grandeur’ of the Sector-1 ‘monu-
ments’ but stated that ‘nobody is going to make
me admire an untreated face of inert concrete’,35
a medium preferred by Le Corbusier and Jeanneret.
Despite this committed belief, he considered the
medium of concrete to be a ‘revolutionary material
par exellence. . .capable of the long spans, the
cantilevers and projecting slabs that could marry
with plate glass and metal. . . decisively (to) break
with the tradition of brick on brick, the static wall,
the pitched roof. . .’.36
Fry was a leader in British Modernism and co-
founder of the group MARS37 and had rejected
his earlier classical approach. With some fervour
he writes that ‘fiercely and in the sprit of revolt,
we designed our first buildings, searching for a
new set of proportions arising from the structures
no longer dependent on mass, no longer domi-
nated by the wall. . .owing nothing to Vitruvius’.38
The Kiran Cinema, however, lacks the drama dis-
cussed above, and is completely dominated by
the mass of the walls and roof, owing almost
everything to Vitruvius. The shift away from
these ambitions was a concession made by Fry
to the climate that ‘strained the system to its
uttermost’. The ‘system’ in this case was the
CIAM Manifesto. For Fry, ‘protection from the
sun and from the dust-laden winds of the hot
season was the architectural imperative, the rest
was secondary’.39 It is also likely that this
approach was more sympathetic to his ‘Modern-
ism with Ancestry’40 background, a more polite
version of the timber-cast European concrete41
Figure 5. Housing in
Sector-22 designed to
modify the climate.
Figure 6. Front facade
of the Kiran Cinema.
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Authorship and modernity in
Chandigarh: Pierre Jeanneret and
Edwin Maxwell Fry
Iain Jackson, Soumyen Bandyopadhyay
and experimental avant-garde approach of Le
Corbusier.
The cinema is the main focus of the central
square, which loosely resembles a piazza: the
Romanesque church replaced with the cinema
hall. The splayed gable walls and curved roof pro-
trude beyond the front facade and this compo-
sition, a proscenium arch, frames the ‘KIRAN’
neon sign. The entrance portal is also located
directly below the sign raised up off the ground
by three steps. The steps are the only acknowledge-
ment the building makes at ground level, the two
gables sitting heavily on the ground plane
without any variation in the wall profile. The
symmetry of the front facade is broken by single-
storey offices and shop that wrap around onto
the side elevation, softening the corner and
attempting to respond to the public square
(Fig. 7). This single-storey aspect, and its sunscreen
in particular, is an endeavour to link the cinema to
its otherwise isolated neighbours. The screen is
extended into a canopy; however, the recessed
position of the shelter fails to link the cinema to
the shops with any strength.
The cinema should have taken a more prominent
role in the public square, perhaps being positioned
on the central axis, with the commercial activities
on either side like the Neelam Cinema in Sector-17
(Fig. 8). The position of the Kiran on the corner
plot contributes to its aloof remoteness and fails to
create any hierarchy or spatial clarity within the
square. The blank side elevation that faces onto the
(V4) road ignores this main thoroughfare, offering
only a rendered facade to what could have been
a ‘celebrated entrance’ (or ‘architectural prome-
nade’)42 into the main public area as well as offering
some relief from the repetitive shop facades.
Cinema typology
The provision of a cinema in the first sector is
important: it presented visual mass media,
capable of creating a common culture more
quickly than a travelling show or narration, and
was also a place for broadcasting newsreels,
informing as well as creating the new Indian
public. The Indian film industry also promoted
nationalist objectives at that time, through films
such as Boot Polish (1954) and Mother India
(1957), capable of reaching and impacting upon
large and disparate audiences.43 The inclusion of
a cinema at this early stage of Chandigarh’s
development was indicative of the desire to keep
the new city culturally linked with the rest of the
country. The central white advertisement area at
the Kiran Cinema would also have been a place
for the hand-painted signs that have become
synonymous with Bollywood and Indian visual
culture. Fry created a specific place for these
advertisements not present in previous cinema
types. He allowed the building to address the
public square not only through its form, but also
through changing signage, which has subsequently
become such an important part of the Indian urban
fabric.44
In contrast with the economically driven residen-
tial designs, the Kiran Cinema is more playful and
civic in its role as the key structure within Sector-
22. Its curved futuristic form with a large span is
daring and the addition of colour into the otherwise
natural hues of brick and concrete immediately sets
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Figure 7. Ground Floor
plan of the Kiran
Cinema.
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Authorship and modernity in
Chandigarh: Pierre Jeanneret and
Edwin Maxwell Fry
Iain Jackson, Soumyen Bandyopadhyay
the structure apart as something special. For the
ordinary resident it would be the grandest building
they would enter. Cinema halls are deployed as
symbols of modernity and progress and as such
were endowed with flamboyant names, invoking
the fantastical and the magical. The word ‘Kiran’
in Hindi means ‘beam of light’, a phrase literally
invoking enlightenment and with religious
connotations, forward-looking, illuminating the
darkness.45 It also comments on the aspirations of
Chandigarh as a progressive city. Most early visitors
would be shown around Sector-22 as a ‘model
sector’ whilst the rest of the city was still being
constructed.46 It required something more than
the rather drab low-paid worker housing and
markets to ‘show-off’ and to indicate a thriving
town ‘which could express the new state of
Punjab’.47 The inoffensive, welcoming face of the
cinema could help to ‘sell’ the city both politically
and economically.48
However, the modernity invoked by Fry at the
Kiran Cinema alludes to a different source and
takes another trajectory to the one described by Le
Corbusier through his celebrated Sector-I projects.
One can detect a distinctive ‘Art Deco’ influence, a
movement that emerged in the two decades pre-
ceding World War II and provided yet another
strand in the development of the Modern move-
ment. The understandable Art Deco influence on
Indian metropolitan cinema halls and theatres built
in the pre-Independence era, extended well into
the 1950s. This continued influence was anticipated
at the dawn of Independence in an artist’s
impression published in an Indian architectural
journal representing the future of urban India,
replete with Art Deco and Bauhaus-style edifices
and large piazzas ordered on an orthogonal grid.49
Significantly, this, by then somewhat obsolete
image of modernity, was framed by the ruinous
remains of a colonial structure. The ‘ruin’ in the
foreground appears to be a world of recreation;
it depicts Indian couples dressed in European
attire — perhaps promenading, courting or relax-
ing — looking, as it were, back into the future.
Curiously enough, this ‘finished/ruin’ urban
imagery is suggestive of the difference between
Fry’s and Le Corbusier’s approaches in Chandigarh.
In introducing Art Deco influence into his
Figure 8. The Neelam
Cinema in Sector-17.
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architecture, Fry took a significant step away from
the specific modernism that was being proposed
by Le Corbusier and its canons, in which the ruin
or the unfinished played a significant role.50 A
significant departure from Corbusian authorship
was therefore firmly established. This ‘finished’
modernist imagery, complete with its dominant
symmetry, was more readily intelligible and there-
fore acceptable to the popular psyche.
Shifts in the ‘Chandigarh Style’
Sector-22 represents the establishment of Chandi-
garh: as the first sector it informed the architectural
orthodoxy for the rest of the city (figs 9, 10).
However, Chandigarh in the mid-1960s was a
different place to the small, developing town of
the mid-1950s. There was more wealth, new
clients (such as industry, a university, large private
residences in addition to government buildings)
and a considerable population explosion demanding
new buildings.51 There was a new aspiration for
the city beyond Nehruvian-socialist ambitions, and
a series of modifications were made to the original
designs to suit the migrant inhabitants.
Vast tracts of unused/undeveloped plots of land
created by the architects and planners to allow for
future expansion were occupied as housing/
market areas, and certain sectors became ‘specialist’
areas for particular trades and services,52 as in many
other Indian cities, but undermining the architects’
design intentions. The city was driven by the
market economy with only a loose framework
provided by the architects. In many ways the
low-density minimal intervention of the designers
enabled Chandigarh to respond quickly to market
Figure 9. Classic
Chandigarh style:
Sector 17.
Figure 10. Classic
Chandigarh style:
Sector 17 Fountain.
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Authorship and modernity in
Chandigarh: Pierre Jeanneret and
Edwin Maxwell Fry
Iain Jackson, Soumyen Bandyopadhyay
shifts and for new businesses to establish them-
selves in dedicated sectors. In addition to the
economic and population shifts there were consi-
derable amendments in the architectural ambitions
of the city.
Jeanneret decided to remain in Chandigarh after
1954, at which point the other architects had fin-
ished their contract and returned to Europe. He
was appointed the first chief architect of the city
and continued to oversee all planning applications
and to tutor and practice with the emerging
Indian architects. Very little had been written
about Jeanneret, either by himself or others, until
Joshi, and Bahga and Bahga.53 In 2005 an inter-
national conference was held at the Chandigarh
School of Architecture entitled ‘Remembering
Pierre Jeanneret’: some of the papers were pub-
lished in the AþD Journal.54 Jeanneret did write
one article whilst in India for the art journal Marg
in which he commented on his growing interest
in the ‘everyday’, the ordinary and the overlooked.
He discusses found stones gathered from local
riverbeds and metal off-cuts from building sites
that ‘rival abstract art’.55 These observations were
manifest in his architectural proposals of the
1960s, the most prominent being the Gandhi
Bhavan for the Panjab University.
The Gandhi Bhavan
The Gandhi Bhavan is located in Sector-14, on the
western edge of Chandigarh (Fig. 11). The Panjab
University occupies the entire sector, creating a dis-
tinct site running alongside the Leisure Valley and
the cultural centre of Sector-10 (Fig. 12). The
sector has a very low density with too few buildings
to justify its expansive area. The ghettoised aca-
demic faculties are remote from each other and,
like the rest of the city, lacking metropolitan
Indian life. Architecturally, the Bhavan is the
central feature of the campus. The architect, in
acknowledgement of the multiple routes towards
the building, has created a complex facade
arrangement that eliminates notions of ‘front’ or
‘back’ elevations. The building is thus intended to
be experienced from multiple angles, each yielding
a similar view and dismissing conventional architec-
tural hierarchies relating to grand entrances and
formal axes.
The structure has load-bearing walls, in contrast
to the column and beam format largely found in
other Chandigarh buildings, and in this sense it
relates to the Kiran Cinema. However, unlike the
Cinema the Bhavan is concerned with interior
light, reflections and shadows (figs 13, 14). In a
similar vein to the Cinema, the Bhavan provides a
focal point for the sector, the more utilitarian
hostels and lecture theatres fade into the
Figure 11. The Gandhi
Bhavan designed by
Pierre Jeanneret.
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background with the glowing white walls of the
Bhavan attracting attention. The function of the
building is almost irrelevant and quite banal
(consisting of a lecture theatre and library): it is the
form that proclaims the message — this is building
as ‘advertisement’ or ‘land mark’, a formalist monu-
ment to the Father of the Nation.
In plan, the building is arranged according to
rotational symmetry in three distinct zones referring
to the wheel — perhaps even the spinning wheel
Figure 12. Plan of
Sector-14.
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Chandigarh: Pierre Jeanneret and
Edwin Maxwell Fry
Iain Jackson, Soumyen Bandyopadhyay
which had such symbolic significance in Gandhi’s
vision of self-sufficiency, and the cyclical nature of
Hinduism (Fig. 15). It invokes the celestial, with
light channelled through clerestory windows and
floor-to-ceiling glazed walls. Apparently ‘floating’
on its reflecting pool, the visitor enters the building
across a bridge (Fig. 16). The entire journey
becomes an introspective process as one moves
towards a pivoting entrance portal, alongside
which a sign reads, ‘Truth is God’.
The bridge prolongs the entrance threshold and
dictates the only path towards the building, invok-
ing religious metaphor and theatrical narrative
through the crossing made by the visitor. The
water also sets the building apart from the everyday,
making it distinct and ‘sacred’ amongst the secular
and ‘profane’. Centrally sited within the a-historical
and scientific University campus, function and econ-
omics give way to the playful and the extravagant.
The use of landscape, water and built form in this
Figure 13. Interior light
in the Bhavan
(photograph by John
McNally).
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manner invokes the agendas of Sector-1, the
construction of which Jeanneret supervised on site
for Le Corbusier (Fig. 17).
The Bhavan is clad in cement panels with white
marble aggregate causing the building to ‘glow’.
The building was originally to be clad, like the rest
of the campus, in red sandstone (Fig. 18).
However, one of Jeanneret’s students suggested
this alternative material to contrast with the sur-
rounding buildings, citing Salim Chisti’s tomb at
Fatehpur Sikri as a precedent.56 The tomb is clad
in ornate white marble to contrast with the red
sandstone city (Fig. 19). The connection is obscure:
however, analogies between the sixteenth-century
Mughal city and Chandigarh suggest a genealogy,
a recreation of an imagined triumphant past. The
result however, is a recreation of the ruined
aesthetic, the anarchic planning of the desolate
Fatehpur Sikri (abandoned shortly after its construc-
tion) is recreated anachronistically in Chandigarh.57
Fry also recalls how Le Corbusier was ‘strongly
affected by Mogul architecture’ and utilised the
‘parasol’ roof design of the Mogul palaces at the
High Court in Sector-1.58
Nehru’s decree that Chandigarh should be ‘unfet-
tered by the past’ was now being overlooked as
historical references, if not forms, were introduced.
Fatehphur Sikri is a pre-modern, pre-British refer-
ence, the city is also considered to be an embracing
blend of Islamic and Hindu styles, an apt message
for the fragmenting and increasingly sectarian pro-
blems in Punjab. Jeanneret was a socialist, sympath-
etic to India: in citing this precedent he was both
Figure 14a. Interior
light in the Bhavan
(photograph by John
McNally).
Figure 14b. Interior
light in the Bhavan
(photograph by Chris
Barker).
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Authorship and modernity in
Chandigarh: Pierre Jeanneret and
Edwin Maxwell Fry
Iain Jackson, Soumyen Bandyopadhyay
Figure 15. Plan of the
Gandhi Bhavan.
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promoting the nationalist-unionist cause and yet
from the outside marking a shift towards the
‘brutal’, ‘primitive’ and ‘ruined’. The stark and
vacant setting of Fatehpur Sikri must have appealed
to Jeanneret’s Modernist aesthetic (Fig. 20), but
rather than the stark Acropolitan ruins that Le Cor-
busier so admired,59 Fatehpur Sikri is a complex
urban ensemble with highly ornate elements and
intricate patterns. It is not the pure white bones of
Ancient Greece, nor does it have similar precise
proportions, rather a more fluid, even bastardised
arrangement of structures and references.
Conclusion: context, abstraction and revived
historical references
Maxwell Fry brought Modernist architecture that
responded in part to the climate, but less so in
non-residential buildings. Fry could be considered
Figure 16. Entrance
bridge at the Gandhi
Bhavan (photograph by
John McNally).
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Authorship and modernity in
Chandigarh: Pierre Jeanneret and
Edwin Maxwell Fry
Iain Jackson, Soumyen Bandyopadhyay
‘the establishment’, concerned with materials,
climate and buildability; he wanted to consider a
building’s ‘underlying function in terms of the
human and mechanical working. . .the circulation
in and about them, their contact with the
elements as with the surrounding in which they
are set’.60 He also expressed an interest in the
site, prior to the construction of Chandigarh allud-
ing to a concern for context and something he
classified as ‘instinctive architecture’. He specifi-
cally refers to the existing buildings, ‘the very
villages we destroyed to make room for the new
city of Chandigarh were the chief solace of our
hard-working life there. . .’.61 He goes on to
describe how the natural resources of the site
determined the village layouts as ‘direct responses
to simple set[s] of conditions with no mathemat-
ical exactitude’.62
Figure 17. The High
Court in Sector-1
(reflection pool).
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Drew also expresses a sensitivity to the existing
site conditions, modifying her proposals to retain a
‘beautiful existing road’ in Sector-22 and to ‘keep
the trees on this beautiful road and yet not disturb
the master plan of the sector’.63 Other than this
singular concession made by Drew and the
comfort from the villages drawn by Fry, no other
traces of the existing conditions were retained. For
Le Corbusier the tapestries, enamel and concrete
relief works he provided at the High Court and
Assembly building are his response to the India he
perceived on his brief visits to the site (figs 21, 22,
23). His aim was not to accommodate the existing,
but rather to take the role of the artist by comment-
ing upon and interpreting that reality through visual
media.
Jeanneret at the Bhavan is looking directly
towards the historical — a glorious, if distant
and invented memory of the past — whilst
attempting to escape the ‘arid functional phase’
of a previous modernism.64 This is not an architec-
ture that mimics a stylised caricature of India (like
Lutyens in Delhi and arguably in the surface motifs
used by Le Corbusier), but rather the Western
avant garde absorbing the ‘primitive’ and re-
presenting an abstract version back to the locals.
This does, of course, have neo-colonialist under-
tones.
Sarin claimed that concessions were made to
Jeanneret at that time ‘because he was a
foreigner’, and a Western one at that. The
‘majority of the proposals sent through him were
sanctioned by the government. During his time,
even the Indian architects got used to getting
away with extravagant proposals on the basis of
their architectural merits. . ...the architects role
became associated with that of the eccentric,
only preoccupied with design considerations,
who could wave other equally important matters
aside with arrogance’.65 Sarin illustrates the coloni-
alist relationship that still existed. The Indians
looked towards the Westerners not only for tech-
nological and formal solutions, but also for a
means for constructing their own identity and to
some extent history.
Whilst Sarin makes important points and the
architecture certainly took more experimental devi-
ations from the stringent rules of the City Edict,
the shift in the architecture at the time could be
indicative of something more than ‘eccentricity’
and an arrogant concern for unusual form. Jeanner-
ret, now free from developing his cousin’s designs
into buildable solutions, began to take influence
from other sources (such as nature, the found and
the quotidian), even discontinuing the Modulor in
his designs (a device that Maxwell Fry also refused
to adopt outright).
Figure 18. Museum of
Art, Panjab University,
red sandstone cladding
(photograph by John
McNally).
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Authorship and modernity in
Chandigarh: Pierre Jeanneret and
Edwin Maxwell Fry
Iain Jackson, Soumyen Bandyopadhyay
It was the ‘one-off’ buildings that enabled a more
expressive and theatrical architecture to develop.
Amongst the inexpensive housing and repetitive
forms used for shops the architects exploited oppor-
tunities to create ‘landmarks’, to act as signage and
to aid navigation.
When Fry revisited the city, he described the main
shopping centre in Sector-17 as ‘stark brutality’ and
‘devoid of street level activity and treeless’, the
forms being ‘unidentifiable blankness that verged
on the vacantly forbidding’ (Fig. 24).66 It was
perhaps this revisit to Chandigarh that prompted
Fry to reflect on the villages that once occupied
the site. Whilst the existing conditions were not inte-
gral to the proposals, we see through these brief
mentions a sensitivity and a regard for the specific
site conditions.
The Bhavan demonstrates a later approach, a
richer palate of materials and a desire for more
formally expressive structures, building on the theatri-
cality of Le Corbusier’s work in Sector-1 but with more
subtle reference to India.67 The Bhavan is not about
bovine and village life as sketched by Le Corbusier,68
nor the reluctant modernism of Fry: wanting to be
progressive and yet sentimentally comforted by
Indian village architecture. The Bhavan’s spiky profile,
perhaps borrowed from the metal off-cuts shown
in Marg (Fig. 25), is more of a refined primitivism.
Other similar objects were collected and photo-
graphed by Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand, such
Figure 19. Salim Chisti’s
tomb at Fatehpur Sikri.
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as bones and ‘compressed metal’,69 marking not only
an interest in the geometrical and precise, but also in
the ‘natural’, ‘fluid’ and ‘primitive’.70 The Bhavan
adopts some of these traits as well as historical refer-
ences, although most visitors will not make the con-
nection and the rotational symmetry in plan is
equally elusive without detailed study. Perhaps the
Bhavan is egocentric shape-making by a European
architect living the highlife as a post-Independence
nabob (finally in receipt of praise previously showered
on his younger cousin).
The European architects came together through
the CIAM, but that seemed distant and irrelevant
as the Chandigarh project developed. The architects
in Chandigarh looked less towards materials,
functionalism and manifestos and more towards
the site, formalist narratives and abstract historical
references.
Figure 20. Fatehpur
Sikri looking stark and
primitively modern.
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Authorship and modernity in
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Edwin Maxwell Fry
Iain Jackson, Soumyen Bandyopadhyay
Acknowledgements
We offer many thanks to the staff at the Kiran
Cinema and the Ghandi Bhavan for giving access
to the buildings, and for being so generous with
their time during our stays in Chandigarh. We
thank also Professor Joshi and the staff at the
Chandigarh School of Architecture for giving
access to their library and the students from the
Liverpool School of Architecture for generously
allowing us to use their photographs: in particular,
Chris Barker and John McNally. (All other photo-
graphs and drawings are by Iain Jackson.)
Figure 21. Tapestry in
the High Court
designed by Le
Corbusier.
Figure 22. Cast
concrete motif on the
wall of the Assembly
Building.
Figure 23. Enamel door
to the Assembly
Building, painted by Le
Corbusier.
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Notes and references1. The masterplan of the city was arranged on a grid
pattern, with each ‘block’ numerically labelled and
termed ‘sectors’. Each sector has standard entry/
exit roads: however, the internal arrangement is
unique and determined by the specific housing
density or functional requirements of that sector. An
hierarchy exists whereby lower-density housing is
positioned closer to Sector-1 (the head of the city
containing the government buildings) with increasing
housing density the further one travels away from
the head.
2. N. Evenson, Chandigarh (Los Angeles, University of
California Press, 1966).
3. R. Kalia, Chandigarh: the making of an Indian City
(New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1987).
4. Joshi informed Jackson that she intends Volume II to
cover the work of Indian architects (interview with
Figure 24. Sector-17,
now with trees and
advertisements but still
arguably ‘stark’.
Figure 25. Metal off-
cut selected by
Jeanneret, said to ‘rival
abstract art’
(photograph by
Jeanneret, originally
published in Marg,
1961).
710
Authorship and modernity in
Chandigarh: Pierre Jeanneret and
Edwin Maxwell Fry
Iain Jackson, Soumyen Bandyopadhyay
Joshi at the Chandigarh School of Architecture, March,
2005).
5. N. Perera, ‘Contesting Visions: Hybidity, Liminality and
Authorship of the Chandigarh Plan’, Planning Perspec-
tives, 19 (2004), pp. 175–199.
6. V. Kapur, ‘Hybridity: Different Moments, Diverse
Effects’ (unpublished PhDThesis; Pennsylvania, Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania, Architecture, 2001).
7. M. Sarin, Planning and the Urban Poor: the Chandi-
garh experience 1951–1975 (London, University
College London, 1975) and M. Sarin, Urban planning
in the third world: the Chandigarh experience
(London, Mansell, 1982).
8. S. Bandyopadhyay, S. and I. Jackson, The Collection, the
Ruin and the Theatre: architecture, sculpture and land-
scape in Nek Chand’s Rock Garden, Chandigarh (Liver-
pool, Liverpool University Press, 2007); see also L. Peiry
and P. Lespinasse, Nek Chand’s Outsider Art: the Rock
Garden of Chandigarh (Paris, Flammarion, 2005).
9. M. N. Sharma (1999; proceedings published in 2002),
‘Chandigarh: early memories’, in Celebrating Chandigarh:
50 years of the idea (Chandigarh, Chandigarh Perspectives,
Mapin Publishing, 2002).
10. See G. Rawinsky, ‘A Fantasy Land, or the soul of the
city? The Nek Chand Rock Garden, Chandigarh,
India’, The Follies Journal (2003), pp. 43–52, and
S. Irish, ‘Intimacy and Monumentality in Chandigarh,
North India: Le Corbusier’s Capitol Complex and Nek
Chand Saini’s Rock Garden’, Journal of Aesthetic
Education, 38.2 (2004), pp. 105–115.
11. W. J. R. Curtis, Le Corbusier Ideas and Forms (London,
PhaidonPress,1986)andK.Frampton,LeCorbusier:Archi-
tect and Visionary (London, Thames and Hudson, 2001).
12. J. Takhar, ed., Celebrating Chandigarh : 50 years of the
idea (Chandigarh, Chandigarh Perspectives, Mapin
Publishing, 2002).
13. SeeC.GordonandK.Kilian,ANQdocument—Chandigarh:
Forty Years after Le Corbusier (Amsterdam, Architectura &
Natura Press, 1992) and V. Prakash, Le Corbusier’s
Chandigarh: The struggle forModernity inpostcolonial
India (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2002).
14. The Village of Kansal is largely unchanged and has
not become ‘engulfed’ by the city because of its location
near to Sector-1. It can be easily accessed by going
through a hole in the fence near the Assembly building.
15. See S. Bahga and S. Bahga, Le Corbusier and Pierre
Jeanneret: Footprints on the sand of Indian Architec-
ture (New Delhi, Galgotia Publishing Company,
2000) and S. Bahga and S. Bahga, et. al., Modern
Architecture in India (New Delhi, Galgotia Publishing
Company, 1993).
16. It was Jeanneret, Fry and Drew, who were based in
Chandigarh, that taught the Indian architects directly,
whereas Le Corbusier only visited site in March and
September.
17. S. Bahga and S. Bahga, et al., Modern Architecture in
India, op. cit. and J. Lang, M. Desai, et al., Architecture
and independence: the search for identity — India
1880–1980 (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1997).
18. Le Corbusier wrote the Statute of the Land on the
17th December, 1951, based on the concepts of
the CIAM 1933 Athens Charter: see Aesthetic
Legislation: Documentation of Urban Controls in
Chandigarh [1951–2001] (Chandigarh, Chandigarh
Perspectives, Chandigarh College of Architecture,
2002).
19. Ibid.
20. Jackson interviewed the then Chief Architect, Mrs.
Renu Sengal, in 2005 about the ‘transgressions’ in
the residential sector. The architect argued that
whilst these designs may not be to everybody’s taste,
the owners should have the right to build houses in
these styles (interview held at the Chief Architect’s
Office, March, 2005).
21. Fry and Drew were not the first architects to
be approached. The American, Albert Mayer had
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already designed a master-plan for the city. For further
details about the pre-Le Corbusier plan see Kalia
(1987), op. cit.
22. E. M. Fry, ‘Le Corbusier at Chandigarh’, in, R. Walden,
The Open Hand: Essays on Le Corbusier (Cambridge,
Mass., The MIT Press, 1977), p. 352.
23. Ibid., p. 353.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. E. M. Fry, 1951, correspondence to Le Corbusier
(Fondation Le Corbusier).
27. J. Drew, ‘Living: Sector 22’, Marg, 15,1 (1961), p. 23.
28. Ibid., pp. 22–25 for more information on Drew’s
design strategy.
29. The Sector was designed to house 20,000 inhabitants
and had exceeded that level by 1991: see G. Krishan,
Inner Spaces — Outer Spaces of a planned city
(Chandigarh, Chandigarh Perspectives, 1999), map 7.
30. Each road within Chandigarh is given a reference from
V1 through to V7 (and eventually a V8), indicating the
speed of traffic and hierarchy of road width with V1
being the fastest through to V7 the smaller, ped-
estrian-friendly sector roads.
31. H. Schmetzer, and P. I. Wakely, ‘Chandigarh Twenty
years later’, Architectural Design, 44 (1974), p. 356.
32. J. Drew, ‘Living: Sector 22’, op. cit., p. 22.
33. S. K. Gupta, ‘Chandigarh: A study of sociological
issues and urban development in India’, Architectural
Design, 44 (1974), p. 363.
34. E. M. Fry, ‘Problems of Chandigarh Architecture’, Marg
15,1 (1961), p. 20.
35. E. M. Fry, Art in a Machine Age: A critique of contem-
porary life through the medium of architecture by
Maxwell Fry (London, Methuen, 1969), p. 137.
36. E. M. Fry, Autobiographical Sketches (London, Elek
Books, 1975), p. 141.
37. MARS is an acronym for Modern Architecture Re-
Search, a British version and ‘branch’ of the CIAM.
38. E. M. Fry, Autobiographical Sketches, op. cit., p. 141.
39. E. M. Fry, ‘Problems of Chandigarh Architecture’,
op. cit., p. 21.
40. J. Sharples, A. Powers, et al., Charles Reilly and the
Liverpool School of Architecture, 1904–33 (Liverpool,
Liverpool University Press, 1996).
41. In Liverpool, however, he did build with exposed
concrete, but with an additional pigment added,
at the Liverpool Veterinary School, University of
Liverpool.
42. D. Lasdun, ‘Impact’, in, J. Sagar, Celebrating Chandi-
garh (Chandigarh, Chandigarh Perspectives, 2002).
43. See R. Dwyer and D. Patel, Cinema India: The visual
Culture of Hindi Film (London, Reaktion Books, 2002).
44. See B. Dawson, Street Graphics India (London, Thames
and Hudson, 1999) for a selection of India’s advertising
hoardings and advertisements.
45. Fry would have seen other early machismo cinemas in
his native Liverpool, such as the Futurist, built in 1912
(and named the Futurist in 1920).
46. See J. Drew, ‘Living: Sector 22’, op. cit., pp. 22–25.
47. D. Lasdun, ‘Impact’, op. cit., p. 46.
48. Land was sold for private development in addition
to public building work, with, initially at least, strict
aesthetic controls and architect-designed plans. See
G. Krishan, Inner Spaces – Outer Spaces of a
planned city, op cit., Map 10.
49. N. Evenson, The Indian Metropolis: A view toward the
West (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1989).
50. N. Temple and S. Bandyopadhyay, ‘Contemplating the
Unfinished: Architectural Drawing and the Fabricated
Ruin’, in, M. Frascari et al., eds, From Models to
Drawings: Imagination and Representation in Archi-
tecture (London, Taylor & Francis/Routledge, 2007),
pp. 109–119.
51. Between 1951, when the city was established, and the
1961 Census, the population had grown to almost
120,000 people and this would more than double in
712
Authorship and modernity in
Chandigarh: Pierre Jeanneret and
Edwin Maxwell Fry
Iain Jackson, Soumyen Bandyopadhyay
the following ten years to 1971. (See http://
chandigarh.gov.in/ and Indian Census information.)
52. Sector-21, for example, is now saturated by mechanics
and not general community shops, resulting in the
inhabitants having to travel further for other goods
and services.
53. K. Joshi, Documenting Chandigarh (Ahmedabad,
Mapin, 1999) and S. Bahga and S. Bahga, Le Corbusier
and Pierre Jeanneret: Footprints on the sand of Indian
Architecture, op. cit.
54. See ‘Remembering Pierre Jeanneret’, AþD, 23, 1
(2006), pp. 24–34; Conference held in the Chandi-
garh School of Architecture, organised with the
Swiss Embassy, 20th November, 2005.
55. P. Jeanneret, (1961). ‘Aesthetic: Reflection on Beauty
of Line, Shape and Form’, Marg, 15 (1961), p. 57.
56. S. Bahga and S. Bahga, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jean-
neret: Footprints on the sand of Indian Architecture,
op cit., p. 33.
57. Fatephur Sikri was constructed in 1569–1580 by the
Mughal Emperor, Akbar. It was abandoned, legend
has it, due to an insufficient supply of water. See
A. Petrucciolo and T. Dix, Fatephur Sikri (Berlin, Ernst
& Sohn, 1992).
58. E. M. Fry, Art in a Machine Age, op. cit., p. 41.
59. Le Corbusier, Creation is a Patient Search (New York,
Frederick A. Praeger, 1960).
60. R. Kalia, Chandigarh: the making of an Indian City,
op. cit., p. 73.
61. E. M. Fry, Art in a Machine Age, op. cit., p. 8.
62. Ibid.
63. J. Drew, ‘Living: Sector 22’, op. cit., p. 22.
64. D. Lasdun, ‘Impact’, op. cit., p. 46.
65. M. Sarin, Planning and the Urban Poor, op. cit.,
p. 403.
66. E. M. Fry, ‘Le Corbusier at Chandigarh’, op. cit., p. 361.
67. The complex roof form of the Bhavan is also illustrative
of an evolving Modernism internationally. Le Corbu-
sier’s work at the Philips Pavilion as well Ronchamp
also demonstrates a move towards expressive, engin-
eered formalism over rationalised functionalism.
68. Le Corbusier, Le Corbusier’s Sketchbooks Vol1 and
Vol2 (London, Thames and Hudson, 1981–2; in associ-
ation with Fondation Le Corbusier).
69. T. Benton, ‘Modernism and Nature’, in, C. Wilk, Mod-
ernism: Designing a New World (London, V&A Publi-
cations, 2006).
70. Le Corbusier also collected, photographed and drew
objects such as bones, twigs, rocks and fossils that
he called objets a reaction poetique.
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