Chandigarh 60+ years since Le Corbusier

The history of the development of the extraordinary Modernist experiment in Chandigarh in north east India and how it became a success story
About this Event

In August 1965, Le Corbusier died on his daily swim in the Mediterranean off the coast at Roquebrune, where he stayed at his cabin, right next to the modernist villa E1027 by Eileen Gray. His cousin, Pierre Jeanneret packed his bags in Chandigarh to fly home to attend to his cousin’s funeral and that was the end of the involvement in the city of Chandigarh of the international group of architects who had started the project at the beginning of the 1950s. 60 years later the city has one of the highest per capita incomes in India. it has one of the highest Human Development Index among all Indian states and territories.In 2015, a survey by LG Electronics ranked it as the happiest city in India. In an article published by the BBC Chandigarh was identified as one of the few master-planned cities in the world to have succeeded in terms of combining monumental architecture, cultural growth, and modernisation.

Ian Macready, after 30 years in the design industry in London, which included working on projects in Chandigarh and in the foothills of the Himalayas, leads Architourian trips to visit the architecture of Chandigarh. In this talk he explores why this extraordinary experiment to bring secular modernism to a dusty plain north west of the capital Delhi has been such a success and but also some of its pitfalls.