LE CORBUSIER’S FAILED MODERNISM

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Chandigahr: An Historic Monument for the Brave New World
CRIT Magazine / The American Institute of Architects / March, 1979

“To build Chandigarh meant crossing many centuries; and to cross it, as it were, by foot. The city was built by hand, and carried on the heads of women…each brick carted as it was 4,000 years ago.”

This is one of the several pensive observations made by the Swiss film director, Alain Tanner, and the British art critic and Marxist author and humanist, John Berger, concerning the construction of Le Corbusier’s city of Chandigarh. Many points that are analyzed in this film help to understand the realities of this “ideal city” in the heart of the undeveloped world. They are as controversial as they are instructive. Though this important documentary was made in 1966, it remains an early, but accurate record of the political, philosophical, and social implications inherent in the creation of Le Corbusier’s vision of a city.

At the time of Tanner’s film, the population of Chandigarh had reached is designed 150,000 limit. Since then, the population has doubled. The five mile green strip, which surrounded the city, has vanished. What remains in its wake are factories and shanty towns, spread along the outskirts. Inside the city, illegal food stands, once banned in Le Corbusier’s design, now thrive in the open. Slums and overcrowded housing have become a part of life in Chandigarh, as in other Indian cities. What makes Chandigarh, different is the presence of Le Corbusier’s radical theories—the modern concept of the vertical and radiating city. But in Tanner’s film, Chandigarh is a flat, horizontal city—a utopia that died in the years between its great masterplan. “The project on the drawing board,” as Berger explains, “has become a part of life. It has lost its neatness.”

Tanner’s film reveals the reality of today’s Chandigarh; it is a grim paradox. This remarkable plan for the city of the future is riddled with contradictions. In viewing the film, it is apparent that the designers of Chandigarh did not deal with the realpolitik, the social, cultural, and economic problems, but only with the surface of design. The plan to create the most modern of urban environments amid India’s immense poverty and ancient traditions has become unrealistic. It has reinforced the unstable and archaic social structure existing in the city. A climate for a viable urban order does not exist despite the best modern communal amenities of plumbing, running water, and electricity. Le Corbusier’s rationalist scheme for the city is, in truth, disharmonious and chaotic.

In the film, Tanner demonstrates the ever widening disparities in Le Corbusier’s plan for Chandigarh. The open spaces—the fundamental principle in his theory of the Ville Radieuse—look vast and empty. They are reminiscent of such megastructures in planning as New York City’s JFK Airport without the airplanes or the bustling activity of tourists. The large omnipresent citadels of government and commerce look more like abandoned airplane hangers than the extensions of a democratic, developing India.

Le Corbusier’s open space concept, traditional areas between the commercial and thirteen residential district, were developed to contain an urban order. But just the opposite occurred. The openness of the plan makes the separated sectors clash with an annoying angularity. The plan’s incoherent appearance takes an aesthetic form of an American suburb. These open spaces or “European parks,” as they are called, are contrary to the Indian lifestyle in other cities, as Bombay or New Delhi, the streets are marketplaces or extensions of indoor habitat. The streets of Chandigarh are for automobiles. And since the majority of people are middle class, as Berger explains, there are no automobiles to fill in the space. As a result, the radiant city has shrunk into a hopeless void.

The immediate visual impression, proffered in this film, is that Chandigarh suffers from a lack of “Indian-ness.” Emptiness and disparateness are the sober realities of what Chandigarh has become. It is not a happy city, but rather a repressed environment in its forced entirety. The strong symbolic houses of government and commerce that dominate the cityscape psychologically reinforce the people’s over-reliance on science and technology to lift them from the abyss of “underdevelopment.” These hopeless symbols of virtue, by coincidence, parallel Chandigarh’s false expectations.

Inside the real Chandigarh, there is a desperate fight for space and a predominate class struggle. The government, despite the outlawed caste system and contrary to the intentions of Le Corbusier’s plan, has designated thirteen levels of economic classification. These levels have created, within the residential sectors, a system of hierarchical spaces, resulting in the city’s polarized imbalance. Two families, sometimes four, share one house whereas the privileged elite maintain private bungalows.

The lower classes, of course, have had to adapt to these tight conditions and in doing so, have reverted to their traditional ways of habitat. The grouping of several families into one residence means that they must transport their domestic activities to the out-of-doors. Outlawed markets have been the direct result. The more unfortunate in habitants of Chandigarh have devised their own structures—shanty dwellings made from garbage and debris. These subhuman conditions that exist in Chandigarh consciously overlap with the city’s formalist architecture.

It is here that Tanner develops the irony of Chandigarh. Le Corbusier’s attempt to homogenize a people, despite their pluralistic culture and sociology, is viewed as an aggressive act of Western cultural imperialism. The designers of Chandigarh disregarded the existing traditions of the people, and attempted to change or alter them though an oppressive process of reconditioning. The city, forced from the cultural past, has become, in essence, a vacuum—a psycho-spiritual ruin.

It is clear that Chandigarh is not a people’s city. It was never intended for the poor. It is a city for a privileged class; a center for universities and government and a utopian dream to become a part of the modern age. But it was the poor that built Chandigarh. They came, as Tanner records, from nearby squatter’s settlements—mostly rural workers, the unemployed, and the unskilled nomads. They came in rags, bringing their families, their beds and their kitchens to build Le Corbusier’s city. As Berger recounts, the entire complex was built, stone by stone and on the heads of women. And after the first stages were completed, the poor were expelled.

Chandigarh, like other vast modern projects such as Brazilia, are the permanent reminders of the failures of our time and architecture. Alain Tanner, perhaps, has best documented this point. His film accurately portrays the repression, the alienation, and the hardships of the people at Chandigarh. The real tragedy is not the design, but the fact that these “bastions of hope” or these Brave New World concepts of architecture and planning remain without the acknowledgement of the people who live in them, or built them. Chandigarh will take its place among other historical monuments that were built by people, but were never intended for their use. As Berger recollects: “Who built Thebes of the Seven Gates?” Or the pyramids of Giza? Was it the kings who carried the stones? On the night that the Great Wall of China was finished, where did the masons go?