The chair was part of the building

The catalogue entry is one line long, and almost all of its value is in the second half: Chair V type, cane seat, cane back, solid teak, circa 1958. Provenance: administrative buildings, Chandigarh. A chair with that sentence attached is estimated at four to six thousand euros. A chair without it is second-hand furniture.

That is worth noticing, because the sentence is supplied by the seller.

What the chair was

Chandigarh was not a building project with some furniture in it. It was a single specification, and the furniture was part of the specification. The Capitol, the High Court, the Secretariat, the university, the schools, the government housing: each arrived with fittings designed at the same time as the room they went into — door handles, window grilles, light fittings, manhole covers, and chairs.

That settles what a chair is allowed to be. It has to be made in the hundreds by carpenters who are not designers, from timber that grows in the region, on jigs the department's own workshop can build. It has to survive a Punjab summer and a monsoon. And it has to be repairable ten years later, in the same workshop, with the same timber — otherwise it is not equipment, it is a liability.

Pierre Jeanneret ran that programme from 1951 until he left in 1965. He was Le Corbusier's cousin and his partner on the project, and the furniture is the part of the city that people actually touched every day.

The V-leg is a truss

Look at the leg and the logic is visible without any theory. An ordinary chair leg is a column, and it has to be thick enough to resist bending in every direction. The V-leg splits that column into two thinner members angled apart. Two thin struts, splayed, are far stiffer sideways than one thick post of the same total weight, because the distance between them is doing the work.

The splay also solves a problem the plan created. Floors in a city built at speed are not perfectly level. A four-legged chair with vertical legs rocks on an uneven slab; a chair whose legs reach the floor further apart does not. The V-leg is cheaper in material and more forgiving of the floor.

Then the seat. Cane, woven as a single panel over a frame. In a June that holds at forty-five degrees, cane breathes where upholstery does not; and — the part that matters in a public building — a cane seat is the one component a local weaver can replace in an afternoon without touching the frame. The chair was designed so that its weakest part would be its most repairable part.

That is the honest content of the design. Not the silhouette. The maintenance.

How it left

Nothing dramatic was required. A public department replaces furniture; the furniture it replaces is scrap; scrap is disposed of by the lot, by weight or by tender. Do that once a decade for thirty years and a godown empties itself.

The reason nobody stopped it is a classification. A chair in a government office is not an object; it is stock. It goes into an issue register, not an accession register. It has no number, no condition report, no photograph taken on acquisition. When it is written off, the line is struck through, and the chair becomes — in every sense a customs officer or a court would recognise — nothing.

So the outflow needed no conspiracy. It needed an accounting category, and the category was correct: this was equipment, and equipment is depreciated and replaced. By the time the Union home ministry issued its direction of February 2011, prohibiting the sale, export and removal of notified pieces, the pieces had been leaving for years.

Why the category is the problem

To stop an export you need a legal category, and the ones available do not fit. The Antiquities and Art Treasures Act of 1972 is built for unique things: sculpture, manuscripts, paintings. A chair made in thousands by a public works department does not obviously qualify, and the Archaeological Survey has declined to declare the furniture an art treasure — twice.

What is left is an administrative notification: a list, not a statute. A list binds Indian officials. It gives a foreign auction house, and a foreign court, much less to work with. The cases that have been stopped were stopped by pairing a police complaint with a diplomatic request, one sale at a time, which is why the results differ from sale to sale.

And underneath the legal question sits a simpler one. The state can prove it owns a building, because there is a drawing, a file, and seventy years of correspondence. It cannot prove it owns a chair, because the chair was never numbered.

What the price is made of

The market, meanwhile, has priced the thing accurately and for the wrong reason. The chair is not rare. Thousands were made. What is scarce is a chair with a documented exit — and the document is the provenance line, written by the consignor and repeated by the house.

So the premium is not for the design. It is for the paper. The same chair, made last year in a workshop in the same city from the same drawings, is sold as a reproduction for a fraction of the price. The difference between the two numbers is the difference between an object with a history and an object with a receipt.

Which is a strange outcome for equipment. The chair was designed to be anonymous: identical to ten thousand others, replaceable, beneath notice. Anonymity is what made it disposable, and disposable is what let it leave. Its value now comes from having survived that — and from a sentence somebody typed into a catalogue.

What is actually worth arguing about

The usual conclusion is that the furniture should be protected, and it should. But the interesting failure is earlier and more general. A thing designed as equipment has no record. A thing with no record cannot be claimed. And a thing that cannot be claimed will be sold by whoever happens to be holding it.

Every planned city is full of objects in that condition — the light fittings, the railings, the benches, the grilles, the paving. They are the parts of a plan that people actually touch, and they are exactly the parts no archive is organised to keep. Chandigarh's chair is not famous because it is beautiful. It is famous because it is the one that acquired a price, and a price is the only kind of record the market bothers to keep.