ANCIENT ornithomancy often read ominous signs in the flight of crows. In many cultures, including here in India, the crow has been viewed rather unkindly: malevolent at best and dreadful at worst. Known to be raucous, opportunistic and unflinching, to the point of ruthlessness, the crow certainly is not held in the same esteem as many other birds. Behind its unremarkable, if grim, appearance, lies a remarkable brain. Few know it to be the most intelligent, inventive and adaptable of all creatures and is, incredibly, amongst the very few that actually thrive in cities.

Of Le Corbusier’s soaring genius, there is, as was to the man himself, very little doubt. It launched into the avant-garde art world of 1920s Paris and found permanent inscription on the world heritage firmament, when it was included in the eponymous UNESCO List of 2016. Over a century, three generations of cultural practitioners, historians and theorists have gazed at its eye-watering brilliance trying to decode its complex trajectories, comprehend its vastness, and imbibe, or at times assail, its radicality. At its zenith, it swooped across a world in flux, furiously unfurling visions of utopic, ordered and ‘pure’ living, driven by a messianic zeal to rescue humanity from the blight and conflict of the post-colonial urban condition.

Basking in the growing adulation of global intelligentsia, eye forever on the distant future, it brought to bear formidable prowess in resolving the rational with the poetic, the empirical with the abstract; all with breathtaking energy and commanding masterstrokes. Then, in 1950, it alighted mid-flight in northwest India, for its most expansive and magnificent wingspread at the Capitol of Chandigarh, before departing with a flutter of affluent villas in Ahmedabad.

There were many reasons for the profound impact he had had. To begin with, he spoke to his time. To a troubled world, corrupted by colonial mores and riven by extreme identity politics, he offered a compelling way to escape cycles of internecine destruction caused by global conflict. He argued that the root of cultural conflict was traditionalism and chauvinism and that in rebuilding from its rubble, human endeavour, particularly architecture, must cleanse itself of the grime of the past with innovations of rationale and cold logic. His political pliability was crucial to the traction his ideas got, as were the huge assertions of power by newly formed states, that they entailed.

 

He inspired fresh agency in architects across the globe by positioning architecture as an active harbinger of change rather than a mute spectator to turmoil. He wrote paeans to an utopian future ushered by the Second Industrial Age and rousing manifestos for architecture and urban planning to create the ground for it. A theorist first, a practitioner second and a perpetual avantgardiste, he led a strident polemic charge against referential traditionalist ‘styles’ in art and architecture at the time. He proposed architecture as a timeless, context less, visual and geometric art practice energized by mathematicism and consecrated by technology and functionalism. His formidable oeuvre, of almost 50 years of buildings and city plans, energized architectural practice with uncompromising translations of his polemics.

Although an apparent humanist, he worked detached and was steeped equally in individualism and anthropomorphism. His analyses and postulations on spatial geometry and anthropometrics were purely visually motivated and devoid of cultural or political nuance of space, either as a social resource, or as identity, or as territory. He assumed an underlying universality in aesthetics that he sought to link through tenuous mathematics to the measurements of a ‘typical’ (read ideal) human body. Ultimately, he believed that progressive improvements to the urban condition were essentially corporal and were created by technological revolutions and not social evolutions.

 

To his mind, buildings and cities even, were or ought to be, prescribed mechanical objects engineered to inspire humans to better living through rational allocations of material, use and space, subliminal cues of mathematical scale and proportion and controlled social and natural convivialities. In creating a futuristic design cult around the machine that prescribed a century of human habitation and resource consumption, perhaps Corbusierian Modernism’s deepest impact lies in our immediate future when the world braces for the first impacts of anthropogenic climate change and biodiversity loss.

In India and the world over, much of modernist architecture, specifically built between the First World War and the Soviet collapse, flows from, or is defined by, fundamental theoretical constructs framed by Le Corbusier quite early in life. And a lot of who the modern architect is, draws as much from Le Corbusier’s committed intellectual modernity as it does from his biases and uncommon personality traits formed in his childhood and young adulthood.

He was born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris in 1887, into an artisanal, petit bourgeois, Swiss Protestant family at the shorter end of parental favouritism. Many scholars ascribe his eventual iconoclastic ways to a home steeped in Calvinist traditions and fiercely proud of its Cathar ancestry, a people persecuted as heretics, by the early 13th century Catholic Church.

Repeated filial repudiation, especially by his mother, Marie-Charlotte, would indelibly scar young Charles-Édouard. Formal education provided scant succour. Weak eyesight frustrated his efforts in the intricacies of watch engraving and enamelling at the local art school he joined in his early teens. His natural intellectual affinities to art were smothered by the high craft skills required for the beaux-arts and neoclassical styles taught there. He rejected this field of academic failure and, at an early age, became an autodidact and a social recluse. His disinterested mediocrity in the family’s vocations (of applied art and music), and in turn, their tepidity toward his abilities in subjects he thought more intellectually demanding, such as fine art and architecture, distressed him greatly.

 

He desperately sought redemption through escape to wider vistas, both literally and figuratively. He found solace in the views of vast horizons, visible as they were only in glimpses from his lonely hikes to the Swiss Jura mountaintops or in long hours spent by himself at libraries and museums. He disdainfully rejected his intellectually petty, humdrum, alpine hometown of La Chaux-de-Fonds (whose entry, ironically, into the UNESCO World Heritage List, for its famed watchmaking, preceded his by a good seven years in 2009). He felt it shackled him, his self evident intellect, and impeded their ever greater recognition.

A festering resentment toward his home and circumstance would fever his teens while self-imposed seclusion gradually inflated his ego. His childhood and young adulthood left him with an unfulfilled need for his mother’s approval. As he outlived her by a mere five years, this would become a lifelong and unshakeable anxiety. Many feel this also fostered in him a deep misogyny that frequently surfaced in his behaviour and assertions.

And so Charles-Édouard embarked on sophomoric travel as soon as he could. In the early 1900s, this was not an unusual nor an unsafe course of adventure and self-discovery for the young European male, empowered by colony and new, speedy modes of travel: the motorcar, the locomotive and the oceanliner. The former would come to define his urban ideal but travel in the latter excited him viscerally. Not only would he variously reference ships in his architecture, but at sea he found communion with the constant, unbesmirched horizon: an ideal salve for his misunderstood, reclusive young adulthood.

 

It was during his travels that he began to define his formula for the perfect life: seclusion, space and sun. Left alone with his thoughts, he found poetry in large landscapes, whizzing past his window, flattened by motion. Not venturing very far from familiarity, Charles-Édouard travelled extensively in Europe and the Near East. Copiously sketching the Classical and Renaissance architecture he encountered on these trips, he revelled in discerning compositions of volume and void through play of shadow and light. Although initiated into formal architectural training by then, he was more concerned with visual abstractions and proportions than with the tectonics of building.

His sketches in bold strokes and rapid smudges of charcoal-black on paper-white would develop into a signature style that would find affinity to the cubist art in vogue at the time. His greatest intellectual find was Vitruvian Humanism and the discovery of embedded numerical sequences in architectural, artistic and human proportions, deemed to be visually pleasing. He felt he had discovered a way to rationalize human intuition and subjectivity. He shed the reticence induced by his earlier artistic ineptitudes and actively sought, and seemed to find, apparently universal geometric codes that pulsated through human and natural creation. He began to use these numerical sequences and their derivations as a theoretical tools to critique art and aesthetics.

 

In his twenties, he undertook architectural apprenticeship in Paris and Berlin. One under the French Art Deco great, Auguste Perret, introduced him to his eventual material of choice: reinforced cement concrete. This new industrial engineered material required little skill beyond adherence to prescribed formulae in design and mixing and yet in moulding had immense architectural potential. It would eventually release his ideas on architecture from the specifics for location or building culture.

Paris was at the heart of the global socio-political churn in the frenetic interwar years. And the early modernist formations of the Parisian avant-garde of the time was at its bleeding intellectual edge. Charles-Édouard was deeply impressed by its verve and celebrity and was instinctively attracted to it as a stage befitting him. He was heartened that the avant-garde viewed architecture as a canvas for radicality equal to art, literature and music.

While its social and intellectual life was exhilarating, the oft-romanticized grunge and squalor of Paris disgusted him. He found purpose and opportunity both in rehabilitative housing in the war-bombed city as well as in commissions for private homes and studios for an intelligentsia willing to patronize experimental architecture and living. By his late twenties, he decided to move to Paris and start practicing architecture in partnership with his talented cousin Pierre Jeanneret. Together, they designed conceptually strong residences based on fundamental modernist principles.

However, homes took time to build, were too small for big ideas and attracted little limelight. So he joined forces with Amédée Ozenfant, a disgruntled Cubist, to produce the doctrines for the Purist movement that first garnered interest for denouncing the discursive abstractions of Cubism while expounding the ‘purity’ of everyday industrial objects. They launched its mouthpiece, L’Esprit Nouveau (The New Spirit) and very publicly took on the Art Deco establishment to rave reviews. And with this Charles-Édouard shed the last shackle to his rustic past: his own persona.

 

To cloak himself in worldly urbanity and to match his growing self-image as a great critical mind, he became Le Corbusier (The Crow), a sharp polemicist and prolific polymath, who dressed to impress in severe suits with prim bow ties. The thick prescription glasses obscured his eyes in inscrutability, and the large pipe added authority and distance. He used simple and clear language in curt sentences, sacrificing nuance for declamatory effect. Le Corbusier was armour, weapon and vehicle to Charles-Édouard’s misunderstood genius.

The crow took wing and broke free. Gaining confidence from the success of his ideas and new persona, he hungrily sought ever greater scales to mount them on. He made grand architectural and radical city-making proposals to new governments and global political formations. He even organized the hugely influential International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) to attract attention to the internationalist underpinnings to modernism. Significantly, devoid of cultural context, his proposals found resonance with the far left and the far right of his time. Controversially, he actively sought interest and commissions from both. His solicitations, however, met with repeated failure. It was therefore ironic but perhaps inevitable that the commision for his magnum opus would come from the world’s youngest and most culturally diverse democracies helmed by a hugely popular socialist leader with a firmly centrist political ideology.

 

Independence may well have been a fulfilment of India’s promised tryst with her destiny, but it appeared to be star-crossed. The immediate anguish of Partition and the unbearable loss of Lahore needed to be assuaged urgently. Nehru’s fortitude in the face of the tragedy was only matched by his conviction that India’s redemption lay in her turning a modern leaf. Chandigarh was to be an exemplar of a nation’s self-belief and a belief in the future and he needed it built fast. Originally, Nehru engaged Albert Mayer, an Indophile American planner he liked for his ideals of urban democratization and ideas for rural uplift. However, the sudden death of his partner, Matthew Nowicki forced Mayer to discontinue a year later. But by then he had completed the essential city plan sans the institutional and residential architecture.

Moving swiftly, a committee of the chief bureaucrat (P.N. Thapar) and the chief engineer (P.L. Varma) was despatched by Nehru to find an architect to complete the task. The first choice were the British duo of Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry. Nehru had been impressed by the sensitive work they were doing in Africa. The pressures of prior commitments prevented them from accepting the full commission but they recommended Le Corbusier, whom they were impressed by at the CIAM, join them. Already a celebrated architect, his reputation for gallic tempestuousness would not have escaped the diligence of the government servants or their prime minister. Realising that more hands to the till would prove crucial for the time sensitive project, the committee ensured Fry and Drew were appointed to design the residential units while Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeannerret worked on completing the Mayer masterplan and designing the Capitol. Thus, Mayer’s misfortune and Maxwell and Fry’s preoccupation proved serendipitous for Le Corbusier.

 

Eagerly grasping at this opportunity to unfurl his ideas at their grandest scale yet, Le Corbusier played Deus ex Machina to Nehru’s Chandigarh crisis. He exceeded his brief repeatedly, at first, by overhauling the Mayer Plan and straightened its curved road network. He prioritized the automobile and rationalized the land parcels to proportions derived from his esoteric mathematics. Eventually, he even proposed a series of tower blocks as an alternative to Drew and Fry’s low rise culturally sensitive housing, but Nehru wisely rejected it. He tested the bureaucracy with petulant tantrums about his remuneration or their lack of enthusiasm for his creativity. He exceeded construction budgets by insisting on building the Capitol Complex in expensive and climatically inappropriate concrete. And yet he was humoured by his clients just as he put up with their periodic reigning in because neither would let the project fail. Nehru famously said, Chandigarh ‘...hits you in the head, makes you think …’ He recognized that by letting Le Corbusier relatively free to achieve his dream, his vision for India would get an icon of modernity that the world would forever recognize.

The successful conclusion of the Chandigarh project is also due to an army of Indian architects and engineers who worked and learnt under Le Corbusier, Jeanneret, Drew and Fry. Among them Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi worked the closest to Le Corbusier, first in Paris during his Chandigarh commission, and later supervising the private commissions in his home town of Ahmedabad.

 

Le Corbusier’s openness towards Doshi was remarkable considering the difference in their worlds and personalities. Perhaps in his final years, Le Corbusier saw in Doshi a different version of his younger self. Like him Doshi came from a small town and travelled abroad to broaden his horizons. Like for him, architectural practice was Doshi’s foray into modernity. But unlike him, Doshi didn’t forgo tradition nor did he reject his antecedents. He imbibed Le Corbusier’s tenets on functionalism and frugalism but applied his mind to their meaning in his context. He didn’t see modernity and tradition doing existential battle. He discovered modernities in ancient spaces and timelessness in new ones. He infused elemental modernism with social and natural empathies. In craft, he saw knowledge systems as vital to architecture as technological innovation.

And most importantly, he was humble and patient. He started one of India’s most prolific architectural practices, called Vastushilpa (Sanskrit for the craft of architecture), in 1955. He established in Ahmedabad one of India’s most influential colleges of design, the Centre for Environment Planning Technology. In 2018, at 91, he became the first Indian to receive the foremost recognition for contributions to humanity and the built environment, the Pritzker Architecture Prize.