A stride through Chandigarh’s past

Amarjot Kaur

Late in the evening, some 30 people assembled at the Chandigarh Architecture Museum in Sector 10 on a nippy Saturday to spend a ‘Night at the Museum’—a guided tour by author and former principal of Chandigarh College of Architecture Rajnish Wattas and Deepika Gandhi, the director of Le Corbusier Centre. Walking the talk on Chandigarh’s Corbusierian character and the making of ‘country’s first museum of architecture’, the conversation traversed through a chronological account of the city’s history.

It began with an introduction to the facade which was a gallery for temporary art exhibition before it was converted to an architecture museum in 1997. Its form, says Rajnish, was typical of Corbusieran architecture; pretty much an adaptation of a private gallery he designed in Zurich. And though Corbusier gets the credit for designing Chandigarh, its first blueprint was created by American architects Albert Mayer and Matthew Nowicki. “Chandigarh was being made at the time when our country was suffering from the pangs of Partition, its collateral damage resulted in a serious ‘refugee resettlement’ problem. The land owners, who were likely to lose their houses and land for the sake of new capital, started an agitation against the government’s decision. The local people organised Anti Rajdhani Committee, through which they could present their demands,” says Wattas.

Though many believe that Chandigarh got its name from the Chandi Mandir (the oldest temple of Goddess Chandi near Morni), the original map of the area’s survey plan shows a small village called ‘Chandigarh’, which also had a railway station. “So, there’s a desi Chandigarh, an American Chandigarh and a French-Swiss Chandigarh which is the capital of Punjab and a UT too. Is that not fascinating,” Wazttas asks the awestruck audience. 

That’s still not the most jaw-dropping revelation about City Beautiful. According to Chandigarh’s layout plan by Mayer and Nowicki, the city was to be divided into superblocks. It was to have cycle tracks cutting through the roundabouts and was curvier than Corbusier’s Fibonacci grid.” The reason why it didn’t work out with the Americans was because Nowicki died in a plane crash in 1950. Disheartened, Mayer backed out. Many well-known architects expressed their intent to plan the city, but chief engineer of the Capital Project PL Verma and ICS PN Thapar roped in Corbusier.” 

He shares that though much of Corbusier’s plan was like Mayer and Nowicki, he did iron out the creases in their plan. “In fact, Sector 8 was planned exactly how Mayer and Nowicki envisioned a superblock; of course it was smaller in size, but it’s different from the rest of the Chandigarh,” he adds.

As the demonstration arrived at the second floor of the museum which hosts Jenrette’s furniture and models of ‘Governor’s Palace’ and ‘Museum of Knowledge’ which never quite came to a pass, the sight of architectural marvels that have been accomplished and with much panache brings pacification, like the hyperbolic paraboloid dome of the Assembly Hall, The Open Hand and the Capitol Complex.

At the museum’s rooftop, one brooded over the sorry state of conservation evident in stained fibre glass that holds original documents of Chandigarh’s making. However, the well-lit stopgap cafe on the roof steered our conversations to a warmer, happier space. In Pt. Nehru’s words, you may or may not like a few buildings, but as a new city, Chandigarh does hit you on the head!

amarjot@tribunemail.com