Chandigarh exists because Partition took Lahore, and Punjab needed a capital. The answer was a city designed as a diagram: sectors, a road hierarchy, a capitol complex with a concrete vocabulary of its own. It is the one place in India where a twentieth-century planning theory can be tested against sixty years of residents' life, and the verdict is mixed in an instructive way — the grid worked, the housing types were fought over, and the open space became the city's most-used inheritance.
Only here
Three things that do not occur in this form anywhere else, each one tagged with the pillar that explains why.
- 01
The Capitol Complex
Bare concrete used as a rhetorical material, with a UNESCO decision number attached.
Pillar 06 · Architecture → - 02
The sector grid
A city addressed by sector and phase rather than by street name.
Pillar 07 · Everyday Life → - 03
Sukhna Choe and the lake
A seasonal torrent dammed into the city's landscape — erosion control as amenity.
Pillar 06 · Architecture →
Written, filed under this state
Full pages that exist now. Each one sits on both axes at once — a pillar and a place.
Outlined, not yet written
The plan for this state, grouped by the pillar that will carry it. None of these is a link yet: they are titles and the one argument each page will have to make.
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Why the capital sits at the foot of a ridge
Chandigarh was placed on the gravel plain below the first ridge: drainage away from the site, cheap land, and a slope gentle enough to draw a grid on.
candidate
Pillar 05 · Arts & Performance 1
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The chair that came with the city
Chandigarh's furniture was designed as part of the plan, then copied badly for fifty years. The V-leg and the cane seat are the honest part of the inheritance.
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Sector 17 and the planned market
The commercial centre was placed at the geometric centre of the plan. Fifty years later the shops moved to where the traffic actually went.
candidate
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A capital that belongs to no state
Chandigarh is a union territory and the joint capital of Punjab and Haryana — an arrangement from the 1966 partition of Punjab that still structures both states' budgets.
candidate