Architectural marvels in chandigarh

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function Dr SS Bhatti

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FOUNDER-TEACHER AND PRINCIPAL (RETD), CHANDIGARH COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTURE; Published over 600 articles in India and abroad

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FOUNDER, FIRST FRIDAY FORUM; Seminarian, Panelist, and Public Speaker

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CO-FOUNDER, INDIAN INSTITUTE OF INTERIOR DESIGNERS; Editor IIID Journal

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EX-SENATOR, AND DEAN, FACULTY OF DESIGN & FINE ARTS, PANJAB UNIVERSITY (19841996); Authored books on Art, Criticism, Poetry, Theology, and Literary Critique

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FOUNDER, DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC, PANJAB UNIVERSITY; Singer, Composer, Lyricist, Musicologist, and Critic

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THREE DOCTORATES ON: CHANDIGARH; GURU NANAK’S JAPUJI; and GOLDEN TEMPLE, Amritsar; Melded Mysticism with Creativity in Architecture and Planning

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IIA (INDIAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS) GOLD MEDAL FOR LIFETIME CONTRIBUTION TO ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION; Author of B Arch Scheme adopted nationally

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M ARCH ON CHANDIGARH’S ROCK GARDEN, THE UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA; Pioneer of Architectural Research & Architectural Journalism in India

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HONOURED AS VETERAN ARTIST BY AIFACS [ALL INDIA FINE ARTS & CRAFTS SOCIETY]; Practising Artist and Art Critic; Appointed National Art Adviser for India by the Italian National Academy

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THE UNIVERSITY OF ROORKEE AWARD FOR INNOVATIVE ENGINEERING

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USES TAKHALLUS “TA’MEER CHANDIGARHI” FOR WRITING URDU POETRY

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

LE CORBUSIER WITH PANDIT JAWAHARLAL NEHRU

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

PREFACE Three of Modern Architecture’s most hallowed shrines exist in Chandigarh as a memorial to Le Corbusier’s creative genius as 20 thcentury’s Renaissance Man. They are the Swiss-born French architect’s Architectural Marvels. In designing them the Master Architect was given all the freedom to freeze fresh dreams of human creativity, thanks to the unswerving political support of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru—the first Prime Minister of Independent India. The three structures, named below, together constitute a large part of the Chandigarh‘s Capitol Complex:•The Legislative Assembly, •The Secretariat, and •The High Court Nothing of their scale, magnificence, or emotive power Le Corbusier ever built before or after them.

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

This study aims at showing, from firsthand observation and lived experience, the vision, philosophy, and creative majesty of Le Corbusier, and what significance they have in the history of Modern Architecture.

STYLISTIC CHARACTERISTICS OF LE CORBUSIER’S ARCHITECTURE 

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Primary forms, usually cubes, cuboids, and prisms, with occasional intermixing of simple curvilinear shapes; Uncluttered surface with carefully-arranged fenestrations; and The first two “generated” by a “plan” worked out by an unrelenting selectivity aimed at what may be called an irreducible seed-form. These three elements would be assimilated into creative expression by what the Master Architect called “geometric ordering of the regulating lines”.

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

LYRICAL EXPRESSION  Le Corbusier’s Architecture is a lyrical expression of his “Five Points of a New Architecture” developed in 1925: “columns (pilotis), free plan, long (ribbon) window, free façade, and roofgarden.” 

The Secretariat in Chandigarh employs all the afore-mentioned five points in a complete way, the ribbon-window replaced by undulatory [or “musical”] glazing. The other two “edifices”— the Legislative Assembly and the High Court—do not have the roof-garden nor has the use of pilotis been made in them, as expounded by Le Corbusier

Design.

in his Theory of Architectural

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

ART AS BE-ALL AND END-ALL IN ARCHITECTURAL CREATIVITY 

That Art was the be-all and end-all of Le Corbusier’s creative pursuits in Architecture is succinctly described by Maxwell Fry who was one of the three Senior Architects constituting the team assembled for the Chandigarh Capital Project in 1950.

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Maxwell Fry has observed thus:

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“Corbusier said to me one day that he was interested only in art. I felt this in his persistent withdrawal from what might be called vulgar contact, the ordinariness that makes up the bulk of mankind and is both its strength and weakness. The loneliness of the great artist shut off by the mere weight of the concentrated effort of creation has been spoken of by Conrad and many another…”

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

LE CORBUSIER’S MONUMENTAL BUILDINGS OF THE CAPITOL COMPLEX 

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Le Corbusier’s Capitol Complex of buildings have the element of exaggeration justifiably used to monumentalise the enormous power of governance they symbolise as the chief structures of the State Government in parliamentary democracy.

Le Corbusier’s “the edifices” —the Legislative Assembly, the Secretariat, and the High Court—represent the epoch-making achievements of the Master Architect’s long and chequered career.

These shuttered concrete structures employ Le Corbusier’s patent architectural vocabulary: flat-iron railings, water-spouts, brise-soleil, ramps, stairs, aerators, and ondulatories.

And all the three have been sculptured by means of a “romantic” geometry.

They have been proportioned with the aid of the Master Architect’s Le Modulor.

Proportion was the only authorised luxury attained by the application of Modulor creating gracefulness and harmony—in the face of a stringent budget.

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY 

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The Legislative Assembly, or the “law-forming” edifice, has a 100m by 100m square plan, a perfect shape expressing stateliness, stability, and grandeur. The hyperbolic paraboloid, the pyramid, and the lift-tower add a touch of visual movement which is sure-footed, graceful, and dignified.

Of all the buildings of the Capitol Complex, the Legislative Assembly is the most intricate in plan. Part of this complexity arises from the elaborate provision for separate circulation and accommodation of all groups of prospective users of the building.

It is for the 180 members of the Legislative Assembly that the majestic experience of spatial sequences furnished by the Forum area is designed.

The delegates enter the Assembly from the parking lot through an unobtrusive door at the basement level and then a reception area with polished stone flooring, illuminated by a glass-wall erected behind a brise-soleil screen.

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY 

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In the Legislative Assembly, the two main halls—the lower house and the upper house—represented, respectively, by a hyperbolic paraboloid and a pyramid are suspended in a grid of triple-height space mysteriously lit up by conoid roof-lights.

These major elements also slash through the cuboid form of the Assembly and its horizontal roof-line as powerful geometric shapes. The repetitive brise-soleil is relieved by a flat expanse of concrete and punctured by a horizontal walkway.

Within the building, columns, ramps, lifts, and lighting troughs interpenetrate in a violent way suggesting, if unintentionally, the fireworks which the legislators would display in debating over issues of political import. The use of Le Modulor has, indeed, harmonised the relationships among the constituting forms. And there is plenty of free space within which to suspend these forms—truncating none, and without any compromises.

The informal place of conversation and rest, the Forum, was meant for the legislators to pause and formulate opinions between meetings. This is perhaps the only public forum which Le Corbusier was lucky enough to build. Its appropriate dignity, freedom from convention, reposeful cuboid mass, and powerful hyperbolic paraboloid and pyramid, combined with an austere aesthetic, prevent the Legislative Assembly from being pompous.

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY  The Forum is architecturally exciting but it dwarfs human presence. It is quite another matter, though, that the POLITICIANS do not seem to be affected by the majestic gigantism.  Drawn as they are from a colossal mass of democracy, they accomplish it by virtue of their thick-skinned callousness which is virtually impenetrable.  The shape of the powerful hyperbolic paraboloid was actually suggested by the cooling towers which Le Corbusier had seen in Ahmedabad. Apparently, the two functions have nothing in common, and yet the symbol of the Legislative Assembly has come to stay.  Perhaps, there is some subtle link between a cooling tower and a house for the legislators.  Nobody needs cooling more than the politicians if they are to be kept cool-headed in the ultimate interests of the masses they represent in a parliamentary democracy. At any rate, the present design—despite some obvious faults—is masterly and many times better than Le Corbusier’s earlier somewhat commonplace sketches for the Legislative Assembly.

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

THE SECRETARIAT 

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The Secretariat, or the “law-executing” edifice, is an enormous structure placed in a striking position at a right angle to the Shivalik Hills, which is Chandigarh’s most magnificent natural landmark.

The Secretariat façade is a sensitively-modulated screen of sun-breaks, with vast areas of repeated pattern, to which life has been brought with the use of balconied projections, recesses, large windows, double heights, and so on.

The skyline is lyricised with terrace-restaurant, ramp-volume, loggia or viewstand, lift-towers, etc.

The horizontal bands are carried onto the end-elevation to obviate, what Frank Lloyd Wright would have called its boxiness, and to give a visual clue to the emphatic horizontality of the building.

A careful look at the Secretariat will reveal Le Corbusier’s mastery at what I call aesthetic detailing, exploiting the visual elements of point, line, shape, and their juxtaposition.

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

THE SECRETARIAT 

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With its great size (254 metres long and 42 metres high: these are the actual dimensions, and not what Le Corbusier has mentioned in his note), the Secretariat assumes the aspect of a massive wall enclosing the Capitol Complex on the north-west.

The building is composed of six, 8-storey blocks separated by expansion joints. The central pavilion, Block-4, contains the offices of the ministers. These have been defined on the façade by a distinctive brise-soleil of deeply sculptured, two-storeyed high porticos.

Almost 800-feet-long, the Secretariat must be one of the longest bureaucracies in the world. The building is an enormous mass of a rectangular prism, which stands as a giant wall to enclose the space of the Capitol Complex on its north-western side.

One plausible reason why Le Corbusier was led to place the Secretariat building on this side of the Capitol Complex is that he had wanted “the edifice” to be viewed from the promenade of the Sukhna Lake with a vast sheet of shimmering water in the foreground.

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

THE SECRETARIAT  Needless to say that this aim could not have been accomplished if this “longest bureaucracy” were to be sited on the south-eastern end of the Capitol Complex.  But a significant, if abstruse, design criterion for the present siting of the Secretariat might have been determined by the manner in which many people, used to reading the scripts of various languages in a certain way, tend to view objects in space regarding it as a 3-dimensional sheet of paper. Their reading habits “condition” them to “read” a group of buildings from left to right as naturally as they would read the script of their language.  Thus, placement of the Secretariat, as the heaviest mass on the left side of the Capitol Complex, has implicitly helped to appreciate its overall composition as a “natural” (and, therefore, well-balanced) organisation of buildings in architectural space.

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

THE SECRETARIAT 

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In a similar way, the siting of the Secretariat at a right angle to the Shivalik Hills testifies to Le Corbusier’s mastery of scale and of integrating man-made objects with natural elements in one organic whole.

He has ingeniously made his grand architectural composition of the Capitol Complex an integral part of the beautiful backdrop of the giant natural feature: the Shivalik Hills.

The rectilinearity of the geometric shape is given a great lateral thrust by the horizontal lines of the brise-soleil screen. The building mass has been broken up by such devices as double-height spaces, the loggia or a view-stand, the ramp-volume, the terrace-restaurant, lift- and stair-towers, etc.

But perhaps the most important single element which accomplishes this aim of relieving the monotony of repeated pattern is its change in the brise-soleil screen in the area reserved for the ministers, the Chief Minister, and the Governor.

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

THE SECRETARIAT 

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Not only does this method liven up the visual appeal of the enormous façade but also provides a focal point for the main entrance. The repeated pattern is what gives the building its expressive visual power while the variations in it only heighten its mythic potency.

Without the now-familiar roof-top elements of Corbusian architecture, the Secretariat building would have had a bald skyline.

The strategically-placed terrace-restaurant has been connected with a strong triangular volume to act as a unifying element in the total architectural composition.

The visual tension created by this diagonal line in a basic design exercise of horizontals and verticals is what holds together the disparate elements deployed in their organisations.

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

THE SECRETARIAT 

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It is this aspect, rather than the functional efficiency of the building, which deserves notice.

The problems of function and performance were relegated to a secondary consideration, which can now be appreciated in all works of Le Corbusier, in the pursuit of monumentality with which the master architect sought to invest “the edifices” of the Capitol Complex.

Considered in this light, Albert Mayer’s remarks, that he found the Secretariat “crude and chunky”, considering the “huge blob”, containing the ramp “ugly and misshapen”, are somewhat selfopinionated.

So also are the observations of Maxwell Fry concerning the Secretariat façade treatment that “…one may wonder whether this is how the monotony of a repeated pattern should be broken up, and whether also the mark of distinction given to the higher ranks of government is not after all somewhat perfunctory.”

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

THE SECRETARIAT 

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While it may not be possible to defend the functional inadequacies of the Secretariat, it can be stated with certainty that its architectural expression shows Le Corbusier’s “Mastery of Form” as a finality of artistic ingeniousness.

Few office buildings in the world would be able to match the fluid grace and aesthetic enchantment of the Secretariat building.

If Le Corbusier ever succeeded in elevating the mundane and the prosaic to the level of the extraordinary and the poetic, it was in this one building—the Secretariat of Chandigarh.

The Secretariat is not a functional building which is also a sculpture. Much to the contrary, it is rather a functional Sculpture which is also a building—and an incomparable masterpiece at that!

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

THE HIGH COURT  Le Corbusier has stated his design intentions/criteria in the case of the High Court as follows:“The High-Court palace completed since 1955 contains eight lawcourts of 8m x 12m, the High-Court itself being of 12m formed of two obliques from the top towards the ground. The two obliques are raised towards the exterior, inclined towards the middle, forming in this way a turned-up umbrella over the justice-courts which are kept in the shade. A system of warped vaults leans to one side on eleven circular arches in the middle and on a magistral horizontal at the East and the West. “The elevations are provided with a sun-control: concrete “brise-soleil”. The vertical profile of the courts elevation is unexpected, giving shade. The strongly outlined general effect is reflected, lying in a perfect mirror which doubles at 10% the show.”

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

THE HIGH COURT  The parasol, or the inverted-umbrella, roof of the High Court is a replica of the sky-vault, symbolising the equable protection that law provides to all citizens without discrimination.  This “law-interpreting” edifice is a sculpture of great symbolic and emotive power.  Although noble in conception, majestic in scale, and evocative in detail, the High Court had to suffer a series of additions and alterations due to a lack of functional foresight.  A sun-and-rain shade had to be added at ground level because the courts were overheating, and rain would lash into the interiors. Enough courts were not provided, nor a system of easy expansion planned.

Thus, additional courts were built, relegated to the back of the “edifice” both functionally and visually.  The judges themselves started to disfigure the architecture by parking their cars under the giant entrance portals . They did not like to park their vehicles with the rest of the people, especially those under trial. Since this was a genuine reason—security, aloofness, insularity—to begin violation of the design intentions of the master architect, it has now become a matter of routine and an integral part of the prevalent system!

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

THE HIGH COURT  It is reported that Le Corbusier once had to pull up the Chief Justice of the High Court for parking his car in the threepillared entrance saying that if a seniormost judge breaks the law, how he could expect the lay public to be law-abiding.  But this did not work, obviously because the Master Architect had himself oversighted certain very basic functional requirements in his architectural design.  The judges had to switch the operation of the courts around, placing themselves against the brilliant light. How could they tell if the accused were lying if they could never see his face due to glare?  These functional shortcomings were typical of much of Le Corbusier’s work in Chandigarh.  These can probably be attributed to two things: one, his advanced age (he was in his mid-sixties), and two, he spent much time in Paris while work was still in progress on the Chandigarh Capital Project.

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

THE HIGH COURT 

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He delegated a large part of this work to Pierre Jeanneret who undoubtedly deserves credit wherever the workmanship shows a high quality in spite of the primitive technology which was available at that time in India.

The main façade of the High Court is oriented towards north-west. It thus does not receive direct sunlight until late in the day i.e. long after the hours during which the High Court is normally in session. The light which enters the court-rooms during the morning and the early afternoon is essentially reflected glare. It is diffused by the sun-breaks, and also by curtains within the chambers. Even so, as pointed out before, some judges had to move their benches to avoid strong glare.

On the rear façade of the building, which houses most of the offices, and has a south-eastern exposure, the brise-soleil is put to a severe functional test.

The exposed concrete surfaces inside the courtrooms produced an acoustical problem. It was thus found necessary to introduce a soundabsorptive surface. Le Corbusier’s solution was the creation of a series of large tapestries to cover the interior walls behind the judges’ benches.

The design of these tapestries was composed by Le Corbusier of independent elements based on his Modulor in such a manner that, although the designs were done in Paris, precise directions for their execution could be telegraphed to Chandigarh.

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

THE HIGH COURT  Quite an ingenious way of solving a self-created problem!  Grandness of vision, prompted by an urge for monumentality by ignoring the imperatives of utility, cannot be justified by mere polemics or the power of “absolute” authority.  The ultimate justification of such “edifices” would perhaps come when they go into ruins to become, as Henri Moore believed, pure sculpture —an architecture which is the (un) conscious, (in) correct and (un) magnificent interplay of volumes (dis) assembled under (sun) light!  Among the constraints within which Le Corbusier was obliged to design “the edifices”, the most important single factor was economy—“an extremely low budget” that did not permit “sumptuous expenditures”.  A note of lament is discernible in his reaction to the challenge so created, when he writes: “The Assembly” has been temporarily opened (6 April) for a month’s session. The acoustic devices and the electronic of sonorisation did not figure for the ceremony. Why was the building opened so soon? Politics have their exigencies!

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

THE UNREALISED FOURTH EDIFICE 

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The fourth one of “the edifices” was to have been the Governor’s Palace, a crowning feature of the Capitol Complex, at the summit of the town’s major arterial road, V2-Vertical, Jan Marg [People’s Avenue].

But this project was abandoned because “the building of a pretentious governor’s palace within the Capitol Complex itself was symbolically unsuitable for a democracy.”

As an alternative to the proposed Governor’s Palace, Le Corbusier is reported to have proposed what he called a “Museum of Knowledge”, presumably because the absence of such a structure at the apex of the Capitol Complex would damage its architectural composition as envisaged by him.

The “Museum of Knowledge” would have been unique because this was the only building for which the architect himself had provided the programme.

Although this project has not so far been realised on ground, it must be said to the credit of Le Corbusier that he had anticipated the use of electronic equipment as an aid of scientific decision-making concerning legislative affairs, which have hitherto been left to the whims and caprices of politicians.

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

THE UNREALISED FOURTH EDIFICE The other structures, which would be included in the Capitol Complex, were called “the monuments”, symbolising as they did a high preoccupation of a constructor. But they are not included in this paper being of secondary importance. However, a brief account of the “Open Hand” monument should be in order because this icon has been adopted as the official emblem of Chandigarh.

According to Le Corbusier, the “Open Hand” is “Open to receive “Open to give “which is the ineluctable destiny of the Mechanical civilisation which today, making use of its machines in a dangerous way, forgets that its open hand shall be filled with consumer goods. And these objects shall go to find their necessary objective even if the whole world were against it.

“This consideration is not a political one, but it is a sign of the spirit, the spirit straining towards harmony—the harmonisation of the second Mechanical Era, turning the page on the first era of a hundred years which has just upset the world and provoked the actual disorder. 

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

THE UNREALISED FOURTH EDIFICE 

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Although different interpretations have been given of the Open Hand symbolism yet, when viewed in the context of India’s cultural heritage, it seems to symbolise the timeless catholicity and warm-hearted hospitality of her people.

The Chandigarh Capitol Complex buildings not only aptly substantiate Le Corbusier’s celebrated and meaningful definition the “architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of forms in light” but also powerfully express the poetry and aesthetic of modern Building Design, which projects the three major arts of Sculpture, Painting, and Architecture as synergetic forces of significant creativity.

Other elements of Corbusian Architecture—free plan, pillar foundation ( pilotis), glass-wall with integral sun-breaks (brise-soleil), and roof-garden have been used with incomparable ingenuity in the Secretariat building.

Although this structure is quite obviously a development of the ideas and aesthetics embodied in Le Corbusier’s Marseille Block, the latter appears to be a bland squib compared to the lyrical poetry of the Secretariat at Chandigarh.

With his continued predilection for Sculpture, Le Corbusier, quite early in his career, took to reinforced cement concrete with avid fascination for its plastic quality, with which he was later to give to Modern Architecture the purest of lyrical expression.

The Chandigarh Capitol Complex buildings are such paragons of visual melody as lend credence to Goethe’s axiom: “Architecture is frozen music”.

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

ASSESSMENT 

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Maxwell Fry rightly observed that Le Corbusier was interested only in Art. This he could feel in the Master Architect’s “persistent withdrawal from what might be called vulgar contact, the ordinariness that make up the bulk of mankind and is both its strength and weakness.”

Impelled by such urges, Le Corbusier sought to raise an alternative world of artistic images, invested with “plastic integrity”, that would be as tantalisingly rich and make-believe as the real one, “having all the coherence one expects except conventional reference”.

Le Corbusier’s work at Chandigarh, therefore, represents the culmination of this plastic integrity as well as his new “heavyweight aesthetic”, notwithstanding some obvious formal and functional shortcomings!

Considered in this light, the Capitol Complex is too dispersed both for the users to walk from one building to another, and to appreciate the juxtaposition of “the edifices” and “the monuments”, except as distant vistas.

In spite of the fact that it has been over-praised by the American architect, Paul Rudolph, as “…the only grouping of the 20thtcentury of which I know that makes any sense whatsoever, undoubtedly the century’s greatest”, the Capitol Complex does not cease to suffer from an uncomfortable looseness of its architectural composition.

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

ASSESSMENT  This shortcoming has occurred probably as a result of Le Corbusier’s meglomaniacal preference for grandeur and extravagance. Charles Jencks is thus right when he observes that  “The intention was to create an acropolis of monuments which would radiate out its presence for miles, even to the distant Himalayas, and while this intention may have been realised, it has resulted in an over-monotonous fixation on each monument, unlike the Athenian acropolis where the buildings are much more intensely related and can thus be experienced together.”  Perhaps, the ineffable loneliness of the great artist in Le Corbusier shut him off by the sheer weight of concentrated birthpangs of creation to a splendid seclusion that would tolerate the presence of no living being for the sake of the marvellous event!  In the light of the foregoing position, it seems difficult to disbelieve that Le Corbusier could have done anything else than approach the problem of the Capitol Complex with an overwhelming artistic indifference to the functional requirements of the project.

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

ASSESSMENT  Therefore, when in late-1950, Le Corbusier was offered the design of the Capitol buildings on a master plan developed by Albert Mayer, he quickly replanned the whole capital as early as February 1951, so that he could devote his undivided attention to the design of the Capitol Complex, and its group of monumental buildings, forming the culmination not only of his own Master Plan for Chandigarh but also of his oeuvre.  In such a frame of mind, ruffled by the anxiety of old age and coupled with the excitement of having finally got the opportunity of his life to realise his revolutionary ideas, it was impossible for him to create anything other than what he succeeded in creating—grandiose, self-consciously aweinspiring, unprecedentedly monumental, and artistically free from any conventional reference.  Understandably, therefore, there could be neither room nor time for consideration of life’s mundane compulsions enmeshed in workaday existence.

PAPER TITLE: LE CORBUSIER’S

ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN CHANDIGARH: Form and Function

Dr SS Bhatti

THE UPSHOT 

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In conclusion, it may be remarked that Le Corbusier’s Architecture is by and large utilitarian Sculpture of great originality and visual appeal. As a work of Art, it has few parallels in the world—and possesses stunning emotive power and expressiveness. But as an object of utility, it has all the limitations of Sculpture meant to be inhabited by human beings.

The strongest stylistic of Le Corbusier’s Architecture is that it has no historical precedents.

Although it is certain that Le Corbusier “never stopped moving and absorbing new ideas”, one finds it difficult to reconcile with the irresolvable contradictions which exist in the Master Architect’s written word and realised work, such as are codified in his own pithy dictum “Life is right, the Architect wrong” vis-à-vis the shortcomings which one cannot ignore in his climactic magnum opus—the Capitol Complex of Chandigarh.

To copy Le Corbusier is easy.

To continue his Legacy is difficult.

But to extend his magnificent Creativity is well-nigh impossible.

His Architecture is ART—the Great Mother Art—as Frank Lloyd Wright would have put it.

And ART is a creation of inspiration, not an imitation of Form!

THANK YOU