Chandigarh, generally associated with the eminent architect Le Corbusier, is an icon of modern city planning. After more than five decades of its founding, the city holds many different lessons for planning and architecture. Although much work has been done on Le Corbusier’s architecture and indeed on Chandigarh itself, a critical re-reading of the current city has been missing. This visually engaging monograph is unique as it sets out, in images and essays, to look at the original ideas and subsequent changes in the city and what they mean for current practice.
The book revisits Chandigarh and examines its built and social form in terms of today’s perspectives, reviewing the changes in the city and to the lives of its inhabitants and its architecture. A group of experts look at the city through different lenses, to creatively speculate about the city and the way that its original conception has stood up to the pressures of becoming a contemporary Indian city. The review of a city’s performance, especially a city of such importance, is not common, and can offer lessons for other cities.
Includes essays by Rodrigo Pérez de Arce, Tadeusz W. Barucki, Julian Beinart, Charles Correa, Balkrishna V. Doshi, Kenneth Frampton, Charles Jencks, Ravi Kalia, Rajeev Kathpalia, Ayesha Khan, Hasan-Uddin Khan, Romi Khosla, Aditya Prakash, Vikram Prakash, Raj Rewal, Marius Reynolds, Jagdish Sagar, Madhu Sarin, Sandhya Sood, and Stephen White.