THE heritage of democracy in India is unique; it is the largest democracy in the world, the youngest and also perhaps the most diverse. This democracy was to serve a nation that was grappling with a lost identity in the face of Partition as well as a displaced population. So on the one hand, building stock had to be realized and on the other, the emotional quotient had to be resuscitated and recuperated. The heritage of democracy signalled the arrival of the modern in India which brought with it a new way of thinking, lifestyle reflected in the building types which had no earlier counterparts.

The making of new capital cities such as Chandigarh that were exemplars of the heritage of democracy brought attention to India on an unprecedented and international scale. Even the search for its architect was unusual, especially given that there was an acute shortage of funds as well as architectural enterprise to build new towns in the country. Despite these handicaps the ideals were lofty and the zeal for ushering in a new found freedom tremendous.

This article attempts to trace three important areas of the new capital of Punjab which mark the arrival of modernism in Chandigarh and as its markers of a true democracy – the Capitol Complex or the Government Centre, the Cultural Core and the University which through their location, siting and use fulfilled this objective. Their design and planning further rationalized the search for a modern building typology reflected in the modern heritage or 20 C. heritage of the city. The reason for the choice of these diverse functional elements in the city is that they serve as exemplars of a democratic framework and represent a continuum in time and space of a modern heritage.

The Government Museum and Art Gallery is the most spectacular building in the cultural core of Chandigarh, which is located at the cross axis of the principal avenues of the city, diametrically opposite the city centre. Running alongside is the Leisure Valley, which Le Corbusier hailed as the vale de leisure, signifying his idea of bringing the ‘forest into the city’. The Government Museum and Art Gallery together with the College of Design and Fine Arts, the Lecture Hall, the Chandigarh Architecture Museum and the Museum of Natural History comprise the cultural district. It is a seminal work of Le Corbusier representing the synthesis of the ideas he explored in the 1930s for a Museum of Unlimited Growth. The idea of Unlimited Growth is important for understanding the direction of Le Corbusier’s research because of the clear-cut manner in which the principle of continuous and variable structures emerges from that of suspended architecture. It treats the plan in terms of movement by the spectator. The museum serves not as a room but as a veritable thoroughfare, interspersed with encounters representing so many events for stimulating meditation. It was a thought dominated by the idea of circulation, i.e. of intercourse and exchange within the architectural organism. It represents one of a series of museums; the other two being Sanskar Kendra, Ahmedabad and the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.

 

The brainchild of M.S. Randhawa, the first Chief Commissioner of Punjab and a great patron of art, the museum has a rich collection of Gandharan sculptures, pahari and Rajasthani miniature paintings that were housed at the Central Museum Lahore prior to the Partition of Punjab in 1947.

The cuboidal museum, 165 feet side is raised on circular and rectilinear deep-set pilotis which provide for free circulation and outdoor display areas at the ground level. A ceremonial pivot door marks the entry into the galleries which can be accessed through a ramp. The galleries form part of the superstructure giving the building a floating effect. The ramp serves as an architectural promenade, facilitating an imperceptible gliding movement from level to level while the museum of unlimited growth emerges out of the open plan concept. The other components on the ground floor include a conservation laboratory and a semicircular workshop for artists, occasionally used as an exhibition gallery. A small lecture theatre for extension activities of the museum is a modest structure located alongside the museum.

 

The museum is built in composite masonry and exposed concrete pilotis with brick tile cladding. Its facades are calibrated through undulatory glazing and slim aerators that bring in diffused light and facilitate cross ventilation. An off-centre upper level balcony punctuates the southwest facade to serve as a vantage point to view the landscape setting of the complex and the Leisure Valley beyond. The building represents several of the five points of architecture advocated by Le Corbusier.

The building design addresses two critical requirements of the museum – (indirect) natural lighting and climate control. The museum makes full use of the terrace as a ‘bringer of light’. Eight sawtooth shaped light shafts on the roof help to direct light into the galleries below and cut out the west sun. Concave troughs above the sawtooth light shafts collect rainwater, and channelize it into sculpturesque concrete gargoyles on either side of the museum. Finally, the gargoyles empty the rainwater into pools located at the front and rear of the museum.

The museum galleries are large uninterrupted double and triple height spaces strung around a gentle ramp – the promenade architectural as Le Corbusier called it. The different sections showcase the collection of Indian textiles, Indian metal and stone sculpture, decorative art, Indian miniature painting and Indian contemporary art. Ratna Mathur Fabri, an outstanding Indian designer, was responsible for the museum display system and the furniture. A reference library and director’s office at the upper level are accessed through narrow single flight staircases. A goods lift earlier connected the various floor levels and the reserve section. The Government Museum and Art Gallery and the lecture theatre are in a decent state of conservation. What is truly important is that at a time when the new capital barely had enough funds to develop housing stock and infrastructure for the refugees, the museum was envisioned as a vehicle for dissemination of knowledge, supported under the education policy of the second master plan. Its materiality – use of modern material – exposed concrete, the lofty triple height pylons, the grandeur of the spaces are all expressions of the celebration of a new found freedom.

 

The second example is the government centre christened ‘Capitol Parc’ by Le Corbusier. It occupies the strategic northern head of the city, offering splendid views of the Shivalik Hills beyond. Its only link to the city is through the ceremonial Peoples’ Promenade – the Jan Marg flanked by the Leisure Valley to the west and beton brut (exposed concrete) government buildings. The Sukhna Lake and the Rock Garden mark off its eastern boundary. The Capitol Complex suggests Le Corbusier’s revisit to the epiphany of the Acropolis at Athens, which from the early days of his architectural career with urban landscape had exemplified his relationship between architecture and its surrounds – the landscape context.

The initial sketches for the Capitol show buildings in two groups, the High Court on one side and the Assembly and Secretariat on the other, with a large central open space between them thus offering an extended view of the mountains. A single structure, the Open Hand, would rise atop a tall podium in this space. Working on this scheme, the composition became tighter and more geometric to include four majestic edifices and six monuments arrayed atop a five metre high plaza where the ‘pedestrian is king’, in eternal contact with nature. The creation of the symbolic axis depicted by the ceremonial path – the people’s avenue – linking the city centre to the capitol, brought citizens to the ‘seat of administration’. The new composition created a Capitol 1400m long and formed two equal squares, each divided into four equal sections, 350m on one side. Peripheral obelisks marked the boundaries of the Capitol Parc, while a water channel formed its southern boundary with the city.

 

The Capitol Complex is a result of 13 years of indomitable engagement of Le Corbusier – his largest landscape project and his means of ‘emancipation of the urban landscape’. It spans an area of 50 hectares, housing the three armatures of the government – the executive, the legislature and the judiciary represented by the edifices – an office slab nine storey high Secretariat, the sculpturesque Assembly for Panjab and Haryana and the stately High Court. The three edifices are linked through a five metre high, elevated, 450 metre wide pedestrian plaza interspersed with carefully sited monuments – the Open Hand, the Martyr’s Memorial, the Tower of Shadows, the Geometric hill, reflecting pools, landscape, plantation, sacred mango groves, but what is all pervading is the bucolic scale within which Le Corbusier sites his urban composition.

The Capitol Parc breaks the long held general view that Le Corbusier’s projects are objects dominating the landscape. On the contrary his buildings – from the Petite Villa Le Lac on Lake Geneva, near Corseaux, to the Notre Dame du Haut – have served as an ‘optical apparatus’ to view and experience the larger landscape beyond.

 

Deeper, recent research into his work and archival writings reveals a strong relationship between Le Corbusier’s ‘objects’ that served to view the immediate landscape they were set in and the ‘frames’ that they created to visually connect to the horizons of the distant urban settings. On a monumental scale the gigantic edifices and sculpturesque monuments he sited in the Capitol Parc, served beyond their function as camera frames to create cinematic narratives. His edifices offered views of the distant horizons of the Shivalik Hills, while the pedestrian plaza tethered the man-made landscape.

It is at the Capitol Complex that the spiritual directeur of the Chandigarh Project exhibited his concerns for the site and the urban landscape into a beautifully calibrated one man orchestra. This ‘binome’ architecture was expressed in his works to conceive the interiors as constructs regulating one’s relation to the outside world. The views from the calibrated levels of the High Court ramps, the portico of the stately Assembly, the pylons of the High Court, as well as the vantage points of the Secretariat terraces and the sunken trench of the Open Hand are frames for a camera lucida to frame the distant landscape. For the first time in Indian architectural history was the seat of administration as democratic as this; it brought man, nature and the laws of natural justice face to face on the same datum.

The Capitol Complex also led to the creation of the ‘promenade architecturale’ (a central element of Le Corbusier’s architectural and city planing design), a series of motion paths to experience the interiors, and from the interior frames to view the exterior landscape and distant horizons. At the Capitol Complex, the architectural promenade is perfectly achieved through viewing platforms, ramps, staircases, that offer varying views as in a film of the triple height spaces such as the ‘forest of columns’ in the interiors of the Assembly foyer. In another sequence, the High Court stairwell frames the Assembly portico in the distance from the curves of its square apertures puncturing the stairwell, further accentuated by the oval punctures within the exposed concrete rampway culminating at the roof terrace of the High Court.

Le Corbusier’s Voyage d’Orient left an indelible impression of landscape and urbanity and its sublime relationship between the two. Carrying the sketches of the Acropolis close to his heart, he claimed the datum to be the l’espace indicible – spatial infinitude at three levels in the Capitol Complex: at the pedestrian plaza, the first datum where the pedestrian is king, a second one bordering the trench of contemplation from where rises the Open Hand monument while the mountains determine a third distant datum.

 

The most significant aspect of Le Corbusier’s work is its moral quality. This is the single most important value which has brought recognition to and positioned him as the most influential architect of the 20th century. The Capitol at Chandigarh is a result of his understanding of nature, history and technology. At the Capitol, as also at Ronchamp, are two landscape projects at two diverse scales, wherein he reconciled nature and culture without depriving nature of its attributes. Le Corbusier’s Capitol gave distinction to the landscape and rescued it from becoming a mere environment. This meant two things – finding a relationship as well as mutual emancipation. At the Capitol, architecture and landscape are integrated in a visual counterpoint, fusing them in the same chord: and as Le Corbusier said, ‘…poetry after all is the feast that life offers to those who know how to receive with their eyes and hearts, and understand.’

 

The third example of the marker of democracy is the educational campus – the Panjab University. The journey of Panjab University to its present day status was tumultuous as a number of camp offices and temporary locations were used to run departments so that the education of youth facing the brunt of Partition could be eased out. The Panjab University began as Government College Lahore on 1 January 1864 as part of the British scheme to expand higher education in India and it was housed in Dhyan Chand Haveli. The University of Punjab was established in Lahore on 14 October 1882 and it was reinitiated in independent India from 1 October 1947.

Chandigarh, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s brainchild, was to fill the void created by the loss of Lahore; a harbinger of change signifying the promise of freedom. Within it was seeded a microcosm – the Panjab University – that travelled from Lahore to its scattering of transit campuses in Solan, Hoshiarpur, Jalandhar, Delhi, Amritsar and Shimla, and finally consolidated in Chandigarh in an area of 550 acres towards the northwestern edge of the city bordering the Patiala ki Rao rivulet.

Panjab University’s master plan is credited to Jugal Kishore Choudhury, who also designed a building for the college of Chemical Engineering and Technology, a temporary office building, and 500 houses for university personnel. In 1958, with the establishment of the Architect’s office, it finally became the responsibility of Pierre Jeanneret and Bhanu Pratap Mathur to develop its urban forms and matrix. The initial buildings of the Panjab University are the four focal buildings placed on the cross axis of its principal entry points. These include the Administration Building, which serves as the nerve centre for administrative, academic and institutional decision making. The five storey exposed concrete pyramidal building is lit with natural light wells and undulatory glazing. The Administration Building is an architectural pivot on the main axis of the university. Its majestic porches and sculptural ramps exhibit its structural innovation along with the skylight on the roof which makes it the tallest building on the campus.

 

The AC Joshi Library uses a staggered vertical section to create varied heights of stacks and reading areas. The reading areas are located towards the front, thereby gaining a well lit, glare free interior and an expansive view of the gardens outside. The exterior is finished in red sandstone with raw concrete balustrades stretched across each floor of the rear façade. The concrete brisesoleil cantilevered beyond the front facade was used, at places, as a balcony attached to the reading rooms. The exterior is finished in red sandstone with raw concrete balustrades stretched across each floor of the rear façade. The Students’ Centre juxtaposed adjacent to the library is the hub of student recreation activities, its cafeteria on its top floor is accessed through a ramp that strings all the levels of the four storied structure.

Located in the southeast quadrant of the original campus of Panjab University is the Gandhi Bhawan, a structure of modest scale. Along with the Fine Arts Centre (teaching block and museum), Pierre Jeanneret’s University Library building as well as the Students’ Centre, it forms the cultural core of the university. The academic infrastructure of the university includes research labs, laboratories, classrooms, workshops, moot courts, computer centres, museums, seminar complexes, auditoria, open air and studio theatre labs, a community radio station and a fully networked campus.

The development of the Panjab University campus represents the overcoming of architectural challenges with an understanding and empathy to the ground realities of mitigating the constraints of a shoestring budget, the vagaries of a harsh composite climate, the utilization of local men and methods of construction and, most importantly, the search for a modernist expression to fulfil the aspirations of a displaced population in the aftermath of India’s Partition.

 

The use of local materials such as riverbed stones, aggregate, sunburnt brick and precast purlins generate the urban vocabulary of the campus buildings. Coupled with the immense tree cover and garden landscape, it is a perfect ‘building in a garden’ stage set. Building orientation to receive northeast light into laboratories and classrooms has resulted in glare-free, 100 per cent natural light penetration, whereas faculty rooms are oriented to keep away the low southwest summer sun thus minimizing electricity usage. The adherence of largely three-storeyed structures for academic as well as residential functions obviates the need for lifts. The provision of intermittent light and ventilation shafts/wells/louvres within buildings and corridors are seen as design motifs recurring across the campus.

Thus, a building developed for science rooms is simply multiplied into a group of similar oriented blocks, while a type designed for the arts forms another row of identical structures. All these classroom types employ a concrete with red sandstone infilling, the science building habiting a row of external columns with concrete floor slabs extended to form overhangs for the windows, while the liberal arts block, of similar construction, carries along the main façade a deep concrete sun breaker of the egg-crate type.

 

The cardinal axes of the campus are tree lined boulevards, central green verges that border gardens, parks and green belts. Seasonal flowers are seen blooming, as well as a dedicated rose garden, herbal garden, botanical garden and cactus succulents’ nurseries and greenhouse are assets of the university. The extensive infrastructure sprawls over 550 acres, with 60 per cent of it green areas in the form of parks, gardens, fields and meadows. Landscape design has been sensitively introduced to serve beyond the aesthetics for microclimatic amelioration through green cover, soft landscape and water features.

The Panjab University is perhaps the only university in the country offering amenities to students, faculty and staff alike. The university market caters to the daily needs of residents and scholars through commercial facilities, leisure and sports facilities and integrated spaces. Residential, educational healthcare needs are being met within the campus. Seven housing types were developed, designated by letters – the lowest being type-A, a single-storey bungalow for professors. In the general style of the detailing, in the use of the brick jalis and the patterns of fenestration, there is a marked resemblance to the work of Jeanneret. Most of the university housing took the form of two storey row housing with customary roof terraces and rear walled courtyards.

The repetitive use of these materials throughout the campus buildings lends continuity and unity, while the patterns and textures created by stone walls, perforated sunscreens in brick and terracotta, as well as the designs cast by shuttering panels of poured concrete enrich the architectural vocabulary of the teaching blocks, arts and science faculties and hostel buildings. Together the ensemble presents a unity of form and design even though the campus was realized over the last 60 years.

 

The architecture of the city, its buildings, the street furniture and related elements cannot be isolated from one another. Its unique quality lies in the ‘equipment rationale’. For the first time buildings and their furniture and fittings were considered as a single parcel: built in furniture, lamps, uplighters, sector signs, bus stops, design of gates, boundary walls, sunshades, brisesoleil which were mass produced and used throughout the city whereby a uniform code was established, albeit inadvertently. Like the code of Hammurabi, the entire city follows the Edict of La Corbusier and till date the uniformity and sanctity of the code – as an unwritten rule – is followed.

 

References:

Jacques Sbriglio, Le Corbusier and Lucien Herve: A Dialogue Between Architect and Photographer. Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 2011.

Jean-Louis Cohen (ed.), Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2013.

Deborah Gans, The Le Corbusier Guide. Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2006.

Foundation Le Corbusier, Paris, France, url http://www.fondationlecorbusier.fr/corbuweb/morpheus.aspx

Panjab University – Journey and Evolution; Heritage Trail, The Tribune (Spectrum), 26 March 2017, pp. 4-5.

UNESCO World Heritage Centre Operational Guidelines 2015.

Stanislaus von Moos (ed.), Chandigarh 1956. Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Jane B. Drew, E .Maxwell Fry; photography by Ernst Scheidegger; text by Maristella Casciato, et al. Scheidegger and Spiess, Zurich, 2010.

Russell Walden (ed.), The Open Hand: Essays on Le Corbusier. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1977.