Delhi, January 29, 2013
Not so long ago we were having a conversation with my friend
Peter Tagiuri about the notion of "the new city." It wasn't about new cities like
Brasilia or Chandigarh (or Canberra, or Washington or Palmanova for that matter)
that are conceived from scratch, so to speak, but about large, city-scale
extensions of existing cities. I'm not
exactly sure what Peter had in mind, but Delhi should certainly fit the bill.
Actually, what is now called Old Delhi was rather new not so
long ago. It was established as a walled
city by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (also the builder of the Taj Mahal) in
1639. At the end of the 19th
century maps still labeled it "Modern Delhi", in contrast with
earlier settlements in the area.
The British took Delhi in 1857. When it replaced Calcutta as the capital of the British Raj
(the colonial rule of the Indian subcontinent) in 1911, Sir Edwin Lutyens--the leading architect of the empire--set
out to work on a scheme for the new capital, Imperial Delhi, to the south of
the existing city. Old an New
Delhi can be seen as an exercise in contrasts. If the old city was a web of narrow streets cutting through
a dense fabric, Lutyens conceived the new city as an axial composition of expansive views, a network of diagonals and circles with monumental buildings
far apart from each other either framing or terminating the lines in the plan.
No comments :
Post a Comment