Chandigarh Under Siege: Le Corbusier's Capitol Complex Threatened by Housing Development

Chandigarh Under Siege: Le Corbusier's Capitol Complex Threatened by Housing Development

Dr. Vikramāditya Prakāsh is a professor at the University of Washington and the founder of the Chandigarh Urban Lab. In the following article he discusses the past, present and future of Le Corbusier’s vision for Chandigarh, explaining the reasons behind the petition he started against a new residential development to the North of the city.

Le Corbusier’s famous Capitol Complex in Chandigarh, India is about to be ruined by the construction of a gaggle of towers to its immediate north. The new project, called ‘TATA Camelot’, is being developed by TATA Housing, the real estate wing of TATA Group, a major multinational and one of India’s largest industrial companies. TATA Camelot’s 27 proposed towers, each between 13 and 36 storys tall, will not only destroy the architectural and urban design integrity of the Capitol, they will also disrupt the fragile Himalayan ecology of the area. In the contest between development and preservation, it is the larger public good and the long term perspective of the ecological that must be prioritized.

The site of Chandigarh was selected by aerial reconnaissance. Late in 1948, soon after India’s Independence from colonial rule, two Indian Civil Services officers named P.N. Thapar and P.L. Varma flew from Delhi on an old WWII airforce transport aircraft, to survey several possible sites for the new capital city. They picked the site where the city is today because it was a gently sloping plain, nestled into very foothills of the Himalayas. The mountains, they reasoned, would assure the city a spectacular backdrop, and also a perfect slope for natural drainage.

Le Corbusier, after he was eventually selected for the project in 1950, immediately responded strongly to the site conditions. “We are in a plain,” he wrote, “the chain of the Himalayas locks the landscape magnificently to the North. The smallest building appears tall and commanding.” [1] He rapidly set to work drafting a layout for the new city, carefully delineating it between two rivers – the Patiala ki Rao and the Sukhna Choe – that drained from the hills into the plain. A third rivulet, the smallest, Le Corbusier designated as the armature of the prime ecological zone of the city – its “green belt” in modernist lingo – that was later re-christened as the “Leisure Valley”. Unsurprisingly, Le Corbusier located the Capitol Complex that would hold the magnificent buildings of state which he was to design personally, at the very northern edge of the site, carefully articulated into an exclusive protected zone with the mountains on one side and the rest of the city on the other. Within this narrow strip of land, Le Corbusier located the temenos of the Capitol – defined by two squares of 800 meters each.

Le Corbusier wanted to protect the remaining land between the Capitol and mountains as an agro-rural landscape. “The Capitol was placed at the top of the town”, Le Corbusier wrote in a special 1961 issue of the Indian journal Marg (which at the time was coincidentally sponsored by the TATA Group):

…so as to take good advantage of the presence of the mountains, the hills and the agricultural life (villages, sugar-cane fields, wheat fields, colza fields, etc., ploughings and pastures peasants at work, cartings, cows, oxen and bulls), this millennial activity touching the Capitol, separated by one single pit of 4 meters width preventing confusion, but connecting modern times to the magistral bucolic symphony.

Modern times, with the bucolic symphony – mountains, hills and agricultural life; this was the modernist vision of the Capitol, a very distant avatar of the Radiant City from Le Corbusier’s past, an incipient manifestation of the principles of ecological urbanism as we are beginning to recognize it today.

And so unsurprisingly, when an army cantonment was proposed in 1960 on the hills, Le Corbusier fought it tooth and nail, eventually moving Jawaharlal Nehru, the Prime Minister of India, to prevent its construction.

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