India's City of the Future: Chandigarh

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2016

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After India's traumatic Partition Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru persuaded the maverick Swiss-French architect, Le Corbusier, to help reinvent a newly independent India by building a new capital city for the province of Punjab.

Le Corbusier had revolutionised architecture and urban planning in the first half of the twentieth century. He was loved and hated in equal measure for his modernist approach, favouring flat roofs, glass walls and concrete.

Nehru said this new city would be "symbolic of the freedom of India, unfettered by the traditions of the past".

Starting in 1950 the city of Chandigarh was built from scratch on farmland and is unlike any other city in India. The broad boulevards, pedestrianised plazas and green spaces were designed to encourage a feeling of order and of being close to nature.

Claire Bowes spoke to Sumit Kaur, former Chief Architect and lifelong resident of Chandigarh, about the personal legacy left by Le Corbusier.

Photo:The Chandigarh Legislative Assembly building. 1999 (AFP PHOTO / John Macdougall)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Witness Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Claire Bowes.
0:04.8	After Indian independence, one of the world's most famous architects agreed to design
0:10.0	a whole new city for the country.
0:13.0	Chandigar was to be a city of the future and the modernist architect
0:16.8	La Corbusier was to design it. I am a visual man, a man working with eyes and hands. My research is directed towards what is the principal value in the life, the poetry.
0:37.0	Le Corbusier was a Swiss French architect and urban planner in the first half of the 20th century he
0:45.6	pioneered a modernist approach to architecture, rejecting elaborate decoration and
0:50.9	embracing function. Typically his houses had a
0:54.5	geometrical frame, flat roofs, smooth surfaces and glass walls.
1:00.1	My cities are green cities. my houses give sun, space and green.
1:07.0	He famously wrote that a house was a machine for living in,
1:11.0	and believed that with better planning both houses and cities could
1:14.9	enrich people's lives.
1:17.0	He said cities like London and New York which had evolved organically, chaotically, could not serve people properly.
1:24.8	They live where they should not live.
1:28.8	They work where they should not work.
1:31.9	The traffic congestion horrified him the most.
1:34.7	In it he saw the great waste of capitalism.
1:37.9	Technology run amuck.
1:39.2	Pollution, road accidents, endless hours wasted in commuting between suburbs and city.
1:45.0	Instead of a jumble of streets, shops and houses, he proposed a zoned city with clean lines,
1:52.0	wide roads, monumental concrete, civic buildings and different areas
	...

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