There are no shortcuts
when coming to terms with the architecture of Le Corbusier. His individual
works are like dense poetic texts combining many levels of meaning over a
hermetic core. Just when the historian imagines that an “explanation” has been
found, the buildings slip away from the grasp of rationalisation, re-asserting
their right to live in the realm of space, form, material and experience. Le
Corbusier’s architecture seems to possess an infinite capacity to stir both
enthusiasm and animosity.
His vast creative
universe is apparently capable of inspiring later architects of contrasting
creeds and forms, perhaps because Le Corbusier himself delighted in polarities.
He continues to function as both a mirror and a lens, helping individuals to
define their own artistic identity and to focus upon generic problems. Rather
as Picasso did for painting and sculpture, Le Corbusier redefined some of the
ground rules of the architectural discipline.
Le Corbusier
constantly absorbed new experiences and perceptions, then stocked these in his
memory where they underwent a “sea-change” (to borrow a phrase from
Shakespeare’s Tempest), before being translated into the stuff of his
own dreams, myths and inventions. He stole things from the world because they
corresponded to some inner patterns of thought and imagination. In this
process, abstraction played a role in filtering experience and in translating
particular things into generalised icons and emblems. Painting served him as a
laboratory. Le Corbusier was a sort of magician who would take things from
their original context and transform them into his own terms. Thus an ocean
liner could turn into a housing scheme, a crab’s shell into a chapel roof, a
freeway into an “S” shaped ramp.
He stole things from the world because they corresponded to some inner patterns of thought and imagination. In this process, abstraction played a role in filtering experience and in translating particular things into generalised icons and emblems.
Le Corbusier’s
creative intelligence discerned unexpected analogies or “correspondences”
between diverse phenomena, so that an open hand might resemble both a tree and
a flying dove, or the curves of a woman might coalesce into the sinuous outline
of a landscape, then to emerge as an abstract calligraphy with no particular
association.
This preamble on
architectural invention may be useful in coming to terms with the genesis of
the Capitol in Chandigarh which occupied Le Corbusier for the last 15 years of
his life between 1951 and 1965. For Le Corbusier this was the chance at last to
plan an entire city according to principles which had been maturing over a lifetime,
although in fact, once he had set the ground rules in place he left most of the
realisation of the city to others such as Pierre Jeanneret, Maxwell Fry, Jane
Drew and the Indian architects who flocked to join the experiment. Instead he
concentrated almost exclusively upon the monumental ensemble of the Capitol to
the north eastern extremity of the city which was deliberately defined as a
separate zone by means of earthworks and mounds.
The Capitol in
Chandigarh combines buildings and open spaces in an artificial landscape. It is
an incomplete project. The Parliament, High Court and Secretariat were
constructed but not the Governor’s Palace at the top of the ensemble. The
landscaping is also not finished. Le Corbusier envisaged a sculpted terrain
incorporating monumental buildings, platforms, bodies of water, terraces,
trees, parks, roads, valleys and gardens alluding to several past styles. For
example, next to the Governor’s Palace he suggested a gridded garden based upon
Mogul examples; elsewhere he thought of using looping roads as in Central Park,
New York. This symphonic ensemble of the natural and the artificial combines
some recognisable images with signs and symbols of a more emblematic character.
The buildings themselves are not separable from this dense “text”, as they
reiterate guiding themes but in a more abstract form.
The entrance to the Chandigarh Assembly. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
He hoped to create an
entirely new sort of urban space with a certain mythic presence heightening the
experience of the surroundings, for example the foothills of the Himalayas in
the distance, but also suggesting the visible and invisible forces of “Nature”
as a spiritualised concept and haunting presence. One may think of the Capitol
in Chandigarh as a “cosmic and political landscape”.
To understand Le
Corbusier’s interpretation of Indian realities, both recent and more distant,
it is necessary to consider the very raison d’être of the new city.
Chandigarh was created out of the hopes, chaos and tragedy surrounding the
Independence of India in 1947, and the subsequent Partition in 1948 which led
to the creation of Pakistan. Punjab was cut in two and the old capital of
Lahore was left on the Pakistani side. Needed then was a city to house
innumerable refugees but also to supply an administrative head to Indian Punjab
and to anchor and stabilise a crucial part of northern Indian territory.
This emergency
situation was translated into a major opportunity when Nehru understood that
the new city could in turn become a show-piece of the newly independent nation.
It could reflect his cherished ideals of balanced technological modernisation
(with the socialist state playing a major role in guiding the economy);
democratic representational government (with parliament, senate, justice,
governor independent but in equilibrium); and secularism (with a framework of
citizenship and social rights independent of questions of religion or caste).
Although it was to be a mere local state capital, Chandigarh could take on
national even international significance.
When Chandigarh was in
construction Nehru referred to it as a “temple of the new India…unfettered by
tradition”. The entire mood of those times was to construct a better future and
to forget years of colonial occupation which had often forced Indians to live
in extremely cramped and unhygienic conditions in the old cities. The themes of
open space, greenery and light which were so dear to Le Corbusier, touched many
chords with members of an elite whose values were to some degree “western”.
“She [India] is waking
up….intact at a time when all is possible”, wrote Le Corbusier to Nehru: “But
India is hardly a brand new country: it has lived through the highest and most
ancient civilizations. It has an intelligence, moral philosophy and conscience
of its own.” India also happened to possess one of the greatest architectural
heritages in world history, and of this too Le Corbusier was fully aware. This
was another side of his task: to acknowledge India’s spiritual and artistic
traditions but without lapsing into superficial imitation or orientalism.
It was a question of
probing Indian culture to its roots, its deeper patterns of myth and meaning,
then transforming these substructures into modern symbolic forms. The problem
was not so foreign to an architect who had always linked authentic modernity to
the radical reappraisal of the past. When Le Corbusier first came to India in
1951 he was quick to grasp these larger political agendas. He was also inspired
by, even overwhelmed by, the selected site, a drainage plain containing several
villages but with extraordinary views in the direction of the foothills of the
Himalayas. He realized that brick and reinforced concrete would be his most
likely materials, especially given the abundance of clay and the indigenous expertise
in concrete construction on the part of Indian engineers.
He responded to the
climate with its extreme heat and rains as a stimulus in finding an appropriate
vocabulary. In his Indian sketchbooks he referred to deep loggias, verandas,
shading devices, cross ventilation, plants and water. The smaller commissions
in Ahmedabad (Sarabhai House, Millowner’s Association Building, Shodhan House
etc.) were like laboratories. He soon established the basic “key” or “genotype”
for his Indian works: the “parasol” an overhanging, protective roof held up on
slender supports, providing shelter from the sun and the rain, but also
providing cross ventilation underneath through sun shading blades or brise-soleil
(sunbreakers). In effect the parasol was a transformation of the topmost slab
of the Dom-Ino skeleton although there was the intervening discovery of the
shading roof of the Maison Baizeau in Tunis of 1928. Variations on the “parasol
theme” can be found in all of the main buildings on the Capitol in Chandigarh.
The Capitol is the
symbolic head of Chandigarh, a city which suggests an abstraction of the body
with the spine of the main axial road and the ‘arms’ of the main transversal
one. The Capitol itself is deliberately removed from the town and constitutes a
separate domain. In defining this area Le Corbusier had to balance many
considerations. He needed to define limits yet make the most of the epic views.
He reverted to a fundamental device for establishing a collective space, the
platform, although he also worked downwards to define trenches for traffic and
upwards to establish the levels and terraces of the actual buildings. In plan
he worked with axes and cross axes but these were rarely directly aimed at
buildings in an obvious way, they were usually slipped and displaced to create
a dynamic tension. The Capitol is a subtle overlay of geometries.
— By William J.R.
Curtis
Iam happy to recount my trepidations while I
was learning under Le Corbusier, my mentor and guru, with whom I spent four
years at his studio in Paris and then almost four years at site, supervising
and giving needed information to complete the buildings in Ahmedabad. This is
where I discovered the essence of what architecture could be.
It was Pandit
Jawaharlal Nehru who invited Le Corbusier to design the plan of Chandigarh, the
capital of the new state of Punjab, and fulfill his desire that Chandigarh
herald new impetus to break all the shackles imposed by the foreign rulers and
rediscover an Indian identity to match our great civilization.
Cities are not built
in a day, they take centuries. Life is conceived here and its end merges with
the cities, its culture, values and meaning. Stories are written about ancient
cities, and so is the story of our civilization. From ancient Babylon, Mohenjo-Daro
to Athens, Rome, Paris, London; all these cities tell us stories about their
culture, art institutions and values which get embedded in the city. A city’s
core is its institutions and it is from where the values and meaning of life
disseminate.
In our history, after
Jaipur came Delhi and then occurred Chandigarh. In his book Discovery of
India Nehru talks about how our own civilization thrived over centuries and
how a new way of life was discovered; Chandigarh was conceived to break from
the lethargic past. Nehru must have taken the opportunity to take advantage of
Punjab’s entrepreneurship and spirituality which gave us this most modern
contemporary city of Chandigarh. Though Post-Independent Punjab is a small
state in the Indian subcontinent, he saw in it a new state, imparting value
giving, not only to India but also the world; a new contemporary magnet which
could attract visitors from all over the world comparable to the virtues of
Paris, Rome, New York. A new world where one could experience advanced
lifestyle, employment, learning and having the spirit of unity of heart, body
and soul; where every being will have a place to nourish family, an opportunity
to work, a place everyone could learn, grow, enjoy and have good life besides
fresh air and breath. A city where there is no strife, no want and a choice
where institutions pursue their beliefs, faith and culture.
To achieve this, he
sent his emissaries to hunt for an architect, planner who had vision, skill and
reputation and conceive a new way of life for India. It is this search that
found Le Corbusier, Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew and Jeanneret. Corbusier in his most
mature years conceived the plan of the city of Chandigarh and gave us another
city equal to Maharaja Jai Singh’s Jaipur. It was in Jaipur that our
astronomical beliefs were built at a large scale to express our symbolic
connections with galaxies.
Likewise, today we see
how Le Corbusier not only gave us the symbol of a new city complex, the High
Court, the Assembly building, the Secretariat and the Governor’s Palace (yet
unbuilt) with a new revolutionary concept combining our cultural values to
fulfill the mandate of the newly acquired independence. He recognized that the
only way to create values is through democratic process. Corbusier, in his four
major seminal buildings namely the Assembly Hall, High Court, Secretariat and
Governor’s Palace, eliminated plinths, steps or levels between the citizens and
the decision makers; not only did he do this but in his Master Plan he provided
a unique, most unusual, and a rare feature of a green valley where every
individual, poor or rich, busy or idle could spend time in silence amongst
trees and parks, where he could not only cultivate his body, but also connect
his soul.
Not only did he plan this,
but he also gave us the chance to view every day our unique natural asset, the
Shivalik Hills and the distant Himalayas, a city worthy of our ancient
tradition and culture of which we read references in the Upanishads (ancient
Indian treatises) and Mahabharata.
Corbusier, in his four major seminal buildings namely the Assembly Hall, High Court, Secretariat and Governor’s Palace, eliminated plinths, steps or levels between the citizens and the decision makers; not only did he do this but in his Master Plan he provided a unique, most unusual, and a rare feature of a green valley where every individual, poor or rich, busy or idle could spend time in silence amongst trees and parks, where he could not only cultivate his body, but also connect his soul.
How does one look at
them in reality and how do we measure why and how he designed the buildings the
way he did and therefore the title of my essay is the ‘Indian Incarnation’,
because I thought that what he was before in Paris and what he was still in
Paris, he was not the same in India, particularly in case of architecture in
Chandigarh and Ahmedabad.
Before Corbusier
arrived in Chandigarh, he had met P.L. Varma, the chief engineer of the
project, who ultimately became his very close friend and supporter. They both
often wondered what could be done and how they could realize his direction for
Chandigarh.
During the years that
I was in Paris, I had a chance to stay in ‘La Maison du japon’, on the third
floor from where every morning I had the good fortune to have darshan
(divine sighting) of another of Le Corbusier public landmarks, the Pavilion
Suisse Hostel for students, at the ‘Cite Universite’, full of glass on one side
and solid wall on the other. Every day I marvelled at the character and
wondered how Le Corbusier expressed his main theory of free ground floor and
garden terraces on the top.
The glass curtain wall
makes the heavy mass disappear. I saw many sketches in his diaries constantly
working his thoughts on 24 hours’ cycle of the day, and how the sun would move
during summer and winter and how the seasons react. Such drawings and studies
helped him to orient his buildings, connect them to the nature and devise means
to protect as well as open. Likewise, he was fascinated by the minimum objects
that everybody lived with in India.
A charpai
(Indian cot), he mentioned as a multipurpose object used to sleep, to carry, to
make a shade, to store our stuff below. And so are the cycles of the moon. How
often he mentioned these cycles of the moon, sun and the birds flying.
One day he told me,
while drawing the section of the Mill Owners Building, how the birds would fly
through the building and he sketched them on both sides and this is how he
looked at life and the buildings he created.
In 1951, when he
visited Ahmedabad he saw this building under construction, designed by Kanvinde
for the Ahmedabad Textile Industry and Research Association (ATIRA) and
discovered the partially sagging concrete slab due to steel shuttering and
perhaps called it “The Beton Brute”.
He saw how the workers
at site managed to carry on their heads frugal local materials and how simple
technologies can work in tandem with his designs.
Simultaneously when he
saw the Muslim or Hindu buildings, in summer and in winter, and then the
overhangs, temporary ones, he sketched them and then said ‘This is how
architecture has to be’. For a person who came from Paris, who talked about
technology, who talked about the population in large numbers and living in a
sky scraper 20-storeys high saw these things and wondered how should one
design? He was a warrior at heart and found ways to win his battles.
— By B.V. Doshi
‘The styles are a
lie. Style is a unity of principle that animates all
the works of an era
and results from a distinctive state of mind.
Our era fixes its
style every day.
Our eyes,
unfortunately, are not yet able to discern it.’
As you can see in this
quote, Le Corbusier has never been at ease with the question of style in
architecture. It seemed to him that the notion of style referred back to an
architecture of the past, and therefore could not be applied to modern
architecture. Yet now that his body of work is finite, there is an undeniable
‘Le Corbusier style’ that still influences many architects today.
I would argue that
there are two styles rather than one. A first, from the 1922–1928 era, that
others named Purism. A second, from 1930 to 1965, that we can call Brutalism.
Historians tend to argue that the emergence of this ‘New Brutalism’ dates back
to, in the case of Le Corbusier, the construction of the Unité d’Habitation in
Marseilles. In reality, its origins are rooted in the early 1930s when he moved
away from modern architecture dogmas, even if he contributed to their
elaboration.
This distinction is,
in fact, critical re-evaluation, rather that renouncement. It is a time for Le
Corbusier where he attempts to do two things: first, establishing new
relationships between tradition and modernity. Then, making architecture
progress through a drift from theory to poetry. The results were spectacular.
No more purist architectures and their abstractions, no more rational
volumetric plays from Euclidian geometry. It was time for improbable encounters
of volumes in space, curvatures or odd shapes, time for material surprises and
colors to resonate with raw concrete, the infamous ‘béton brut’.
When I designed the
exhibition in Marseilles in 2013, I was interested in the origins of this
Brutalist ‘style’ in Le Corbusier’s work. He himself defined this Brutalism as
‘clumsy romanticism’.
Coming back to the
origins of his Brutalist positioning, I suggest we mainly look into the
following directions. The everlasting fascination of Le Corbusier for nature,
both in its geomorphic and cosmic dimensions. He considered nature, man, and
architecture, three intricate and non-dissociable elements of a project.
Second, the ambivalence between his attraction for industrial rationality and
his idealization of craft. Then, his passion for both grand historical works of
architecture, and vernacular architecture.
Additionally, his
discovery of primitive arts and art brut, particularly through his cousin Louis
Soutter’s drawings. Finally, his undying love for the Mediterranean, a place
for ancestral cultures with the note-worthy presence of Greece and the
Parthenon in the origins of architecture.
This is how, between
1945 and 1965, that is exactly 20 years,
Le Corbusier delivered around 20 Brutalist chefs-d’oeuvres, in a magnificent
unity of thinking. I want to stress here the importance of this unity, as these
works stand today as major figures of the 20th century global architectural
landscape.
These chefs-d’oeuvre,
that I will provocatively designate as post-modern, question (just like
numerous prototypes) the programs they were invited to solve, whether it be
individual collective housing, a chapel, a convent, a museum, a hospital, or
even a palace. In this objective, they set up audacious composition systems in
plan, sections and façades. They attempt to mix construction technologies
ranging from the most archaic to the most sophisticated, to finally establish
astonishing relationships between all disciplines of the arts, what Le
Corbusier called la synthèse des arts, or the ‘artistic symbiosis’. These systems contributed to the development
of new images and imposed a new way of thinking architecture in the light of
its most essential component: poetry.
(Edited excerpts from Le Corbusier Rediscovered: Chandigarh and Beyond with permission from Niyogi Books.)
