Chandigarh as an argument

In 1947 Punjab was cut in half and its capital, Lahore, ended up on the Pakistani side. A state with no capital, a refugee crisis of millions, and a national government that wanted a symbol of the new India: that is the brief. Chandigarh was not commissioned as an experiment in urbanism. It was commissioned because there was nowhere for the government to sit.

Two plans, and the one that got away

The first plan was by Albert Mayer, an American planner, working with the Polish-American architect Matthew Nowicki. Their scheme was a loose neighbourhood-based plan with a curved road network and a great deal of attention to pedestrian movement and to the scale of the street. Nowicki died in a plane crash in 1950, and Mayer withdrew.

Le Corbusier was brought in in 1951, with Pierre Jeanneret, Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry. What he produced was the opposite of Nowicki's scheme: a rectilinear grid of sectors, each roughly 800 by 1,200 metres, with a road hierarchy that separates fast traffic from slow, and a monumental Capitol at the northern edge, set apart from the city it governs.

The comparison is the most underrated fact about Chandigarh. Almost every criticism of the city — its scale, its windswept roads, its indifference to the pedestrian — is a criticism of a choice that was made in 1951 against an alternative that already existed. This was not the only modernism available. It was the one that won.

What the sector actually is

The sector is the unit that works, and it works better than the criticism usually admits. Each one is a walled rectangle with a market, a school, a clinic, a park and a set of housing types arranged by income. You can live a full week inside one without crossing a major road. The interior streets are slow; the perimeter roads are fast. The system is legible to a child.

It is also, in social terms, a deliberate break with the Indian street. The sector has no bazaar. Commerce is confined to a defined market square, and the mixed-use street — the thing that makes an Indian town work — was designed out. That was a public-health argument as much as an aesthetic one: the planners had tuberculosis and cholera in mind, and a dense mixed street looked like a disease vector.

Seventy years later the verdict is mixed in an interesting way. The sector produced a very high quality of residential life: quiet, green, serviced, safe. It also produced a city with almost no street life outside the designated markets, and a car dependency that the plan did not anticipate because it assumed a much lower rate of car ownership than India reached.

The Capitol: architecture as a speech

The Capitol Complex at the northern edge — the Assembly, the Secretariat, the High Court, and the Open Hand monument — is now a UNESCO site as part of the transnational listing of Le Corbusier's work. It is also the most extreme piece of architectural rhetoric in India.

The buildings are set on a vast plain of concrete and lawn, separated by distances that are meaningless on foot and dramatic in a car. The High Court has a roof that lifts off the building like a lid held by piers, and a brise-soleil of deep fins that does real work against the sun. The Assembly has a hyperbolic-paraboloid roof and a cooling tower that is sculptural and also functional. The Open Hand is a 26-metre monument on a pivot that was supposed to turn with the wind and has not turned in decades.

The paradox of the Capitol is that its best buildings are the ones where the climate engineering is most visible. The brise-soleil, the double roof, the water in the courts — these are Corbusier's Indian lessons, learned in Ahmedabad and applied here. Where he trusted the device, the building works. Where he trusted the gesture, it is a sculpture with a bad maintenance record.

The argument, stated fairly

The case against: the plan is anti-urban. Its roads are too wide, its setbacks too generous, its density too low. It consumes land at a rate no Indian city can afford; it makes walking unpleasant in exactly the climate where walking should be encouraged; and its concrete, in a place that reaches 45 degrees, stores heat and releases it at night.

The case for: it delivered, on time and to spec, a functioning capital for a state that had none, with water, drainage, schools and housing for a population that was growing faster than any plan predicted. Its sector system has proved adaptable — the housing has been extended, subdivided and commercialised in ways the plan did not allow, and it has absorbed that without collapse. Very few planned cities of the twentieth century can say that.

Both are true. That is why Chandigarh is worth studying rather than judging. It is one of the few places where a complete modernist theory of the city was built at full scale, in a climate and a culture it was not designed for, and then left to run for seventy years with a census every decade. The result is not a verdict on modernism. It is evidence.

How to read it

Do not start at the Capitol. Start in a residential sector, Sector 22 or Sector 35, and walk the interior streets at eight in the morning. That is where the plan is most convincing: quiet, shaded, children going to school, a market at the centre.

Then take a car to the Capitol and notice the change in scale. The distance between the car park and the High Court door is a political statement about who this architecture is for.

Then go to Sector 17, the commercial centre, in the evening. It is a plaza, not a bazaar; it works as a public space and it is nothing like an Indian market. Whether that is a loss or a gain is the argument, and you can have it with yourself on a bench.

Entry 07 of Architecture. The previous entry, Indo-Saracenic, is the opposite case: an architecture that quoted India. This one legislated for it.