Jaipur, February 1, 2013
The good news is that Le Corbusier's Capitol buildings at
Chandigarh--the High Court, the Secretariat and the Assembly--remain
extraordinarily powerful. Also,
that more than fifty years after their completion, they are in reasonably good
shape and full of activity. The bad
news is that the open spaces and the relationships between the buildings have
been completely destroyed by the combined assaults of parking and security.
Actually, the truth is that without the Governor's Palace in
the middle, the open expanse between the High Court and the Assembly became simply too vast to work, to create any spatial tension.
Le Corbusier obviously knew this and when politics left the Palace on
the drawing boards, he proposed a "Museum of Knowledge" (yes, modest he never was) for the spot,
as a last-ditch effort to complete the scheme. But nothing ever happened.
Today, surrounded by acres of parking, chopped up by fences of barbed wire and blocked by innumerable makeshift checkpoints,
Chandigarh's Capitol Complex is nothing but a wasteland of dirt and broken
pavement, mostly left to a few civil servants playing cricket and occasional monkeys
(really) roaming around. Lonely
and overpowered, the exquisite sunken court with the Open Hand offers a glimpse
of what it could have been.
Or maybe it's still possible... who knows, what if, at Chandigarh, Le Corbusier is Michelangelo
waiting for his Bernini?
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