Space, the Ideal City, and Society

Some notes on ideal cities and
Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh

Ulrich Gehmann, Director Ideal Spaces Foundation

Taking Chandigarh in India as a case example, essential aspects of an ideal city will be outlined, together with some basic assumptions behind it. What kind of architecture shall be installed, for what (assumed) kind of human beings? What kind of society is envisaged by its architecture? Speaking about architecture, one always speaks about a human condition, a conditio humana and its anchorage in cultural memory and heritage, those basic assumptions which serve as lead ideas for making architecture, in particular ideal architecture.

Introduction

In February 2024, the author had the chance to visit Chandigarh in India, the capital of the Punjab and Haryana regions in Northern India, designed as an ideal city by Le Corbusier and his team during the 1950s and early 1960s. The author was invited by Loveneet Thakur,^[1] member of the Punjab/Haryana High Court, to visit the city with other local persons and to discuss central issues regarding the original plan; as well as the recent situation of Chandigarh.

When looking at the general relations between Self, Space, and Society, the very idea of an ideal city is crucial. Brought to its core, it is the idea of creating an architectural environment for humans that can foster a positive development of the individual person, the Self, and aligned with this, positive social relations. Ideal cities are expressions of concepts about a “good society” on the individual, as well as the communal level. The basic assumption behind this is that architecture can influence individual perception and behaviour in a positive direction – whatever “positive” means, depending on the concept – and as an overall result, that the sociability, the way how people treat and relate to each other, will improve towards a better society. ‘Spatial design is the essence of architectural creation,’ said August Schmarsow^[2] at the beginning of modernist architecture in early 20th century. Regarding an ideal city, the idea (and hope) was that new spaces should influence human behaviour in a positive direction. This idea is not confined to modernist architecture, it has been inherent to all conceptions of ideal cities as an “ideal” home for “good” human beings; from Plato’s ideal city onwards. In the 20th century, it gained a new drive, due to the need to house masses of such human beings, compared to the population numbers of former eras, and due to the hope put in new technologies, also in constructing spaces and buildings in new, unforeseen ways. At the beginning of the 20th century, the pioneer of modern art and architecture Piet Mondrian said that ‘with good will, it must be possible to create an earthly paradise.’^[3]

In its pronounced expression, the idea of the ideal city refers to the Italian Renaissance, with its concept of the citta felice, the happy city as ‘a city whose inhabitants would be able to accommodate one another in creating a good life.’^[4] Le Corbusier was influenced by Renaissance concepts, and in their line of conceptualizing, such a happy city could be constructed according to human proportion. It is an old cultural heritage reaching back to Antiquity, a heritage that strongly influenced the Renaissance and the epochs thereafter. Following this line of influence, for Le Corbusier, geometry and mathematics were central to achieve such a proportion, also in modern times. ‘Geometry is the base. At the same time, it is the material carrier for symbols which denote perfection, the divine. It gives us the sublime satisfactions of mathematics.’ For him, geometry is the man-made means to conceive our environment and to express ourselves. ^[5]

The Symbolics of the Ideal City

An ideal city has a symbolic character, standing for the hopes and aspirations of its builders how a society should look like and live. It owns a utopian character. In symbolic terms, an ideal city is a cosmos by itself, standing for an ideal society. If built, it is a utopia realized.

Quite frequently, the symbolic expression extends to the tiniest detail. The above image shows a manhole cover, entrance into Chandigarh’s canalization system. It shows what an ideal city is all about, in its symbolic intention: a closed cosmos of order that separates itself from an outer world, an “otherness” that is organized differently, if at all. The island of the utopian order gets separated from the proverbial rest of the world.

Related to the utopian character of such an ideal space, as the manifestation of an ideal societal order, very often, the city as a cosmos was the epitome of a larger cosmos, that of an ideal state the city in question was part of, also as such a state’s capital. The structure of the city expressed the one of the ideal state the city was part of. In the first explicitly named utopia of a beginning modern era, for instance, in Thomas Morus’ Utopia from 1516, all the 54 cities of his utopian island were structured identical, following the structure of its capital city.^[6] The symbol of the cosmos is of utmost importance, it goes back in time to the Mesopotamian origins of an occidental culture. On an Assyrian bas-relief, a city is shown as a walled circle (a protected cosmos) divided into 4 quadrants by 4 main roads, like the 4 streams of a biblical paradise. It is no concrete city that is depicted here, just the allegory of a city/cosmos; it could be any city, a symbol for a life that is genuinely human.^[7]

When we look at ideal cities, we are dealing with symbolical cities, in the end.^[8] Next to representing a cosmos, an ideal city is standing for progress and hence, closely relates to utopia. If the essence of utopia consists in prefiguring another reality,^[9] then the idea of progress is at hand: the ideal city is designed to provide a better future for its inhabitants, compared to their existing present. A utopian move is inherent to ideal cities. The ideal city is an epitome for symbolized progress – towards a better living, a better society, a better unfolding of the Self.

It belongs to utopia that the human being is not only reconciled with itself – as an individual (Self) as well as in a societal context – but also with the world as such, conceived as an ordered cosmos. Nature belongs to such a cosmos, not just culture. It is about harmonizing nature with culture; and in the end, about achieving harmony as such – with oneself, the society, the world. Le Corbusier stated in his work Vers une architecture that harmony is the axis of the world: ‘This is indeed the axis on which man is organized in perfect accord with nature and probably with the universe, this axis of organization which must indeed be that on which all phenomena and all objects of nature are based; this axis leads us to assume a unity of conduct in the universe[…] The laws of physics are thus a corollary to this axis, and if we recognize (and love) science and its works […] we obtain a possible definition of harmony, that is to say a moment of accord with the axis which lies in man, and so with the laws of the universe – a return to universal law.’^[10] By applying the works of science and the laws of geometry and mathematics addressed earlier, it must be possible, in other words, to erect an ideal city as an ideal home for humans, a proper “shell” for them. In fact, a world as ideal artifact, epitomized by an ideal city. And this artifact is still is connected to nature, and to the cosmos as whole. Le Corbusier: ‘Man […] creates harmony; unity of man and his shell; of the earth and his buildings; the individual and the community; man, nature, and the cosmos.’

The striving for harmony is by no means confined to Le Corbusier; he just expresses it in most convincing words, with an evidence of the occidental cultural heritage behind it: next to Platonism, ‘Such a vision of harmony might well have sprung from the tradition of Renaissance humanism’, and ‘If the works of man are able to attain a unity that is […] representative of the order of the natural world, then a universal principle of unity must act as a shaping force for society as much as for its artifacts.’ ^[11] It is what an ideal city is all about. Harmony means some kind of unity, in an ordered world (a cosmos) as well as in nature, society, and in the individual human being, the Self. This harmonious unity can be constructed, by a world as ideal artifact. After the first paradise had been lost and the tower of Babel failed, we are now in the position to create a new paradise – just as Mondrian said in the beginning.

Constructions of Paradise

Harmony and unity do not have to be identical with uniformity. For Le Corbusier, the contrary is the case: they are the result of life, of certain dynamics: ‘Law and unity are the product of diversity, of movement, of life, held together by a great mathematical axis running through them.’^[12]

Bringing this cosmic principle down to earth, to provide a frame for the dynamics of life through an ideal city is not just a matter of architecture, but also a social one. Not only as regards architectural forms but also human individuals, the question is how to align diversity with unity. In terms of both architectural and social space: how to keep the individuality and hence, the identity of the Self intact although an ideal unified space is constructed? Even more: what is to be constructed in which forms of expression that such a space is helpful for social and (thus) individual prospering? Since this is the final aim of an ideal city; and if such a city is part of an ideal state, of the ideal state.

The problem is that an ideal state, no matter if only an ideal city or an entire statal entity, is an end state – because it is ideal, and in terms of logic, more “ideal” than being (already) ideal is not possible. Expressed in mythological terms, a paradise is an end point of development. Utopia might be associated with progress as stated earlier; but once that progress happened, when it became realized in a real utopia, then the whole venture towards an ideal state of being has finished. Paradises tend to be static. Once achieved in a progressive move, an ideal state, no matter its form, is an end state. We have a feeling of unease when, and if, fully realizing what this could mean, in the dystopian case. The recent history has been full of examples of such cases, from the Third Reich to the Soviet Union, from an ideal social empire of Mao Zedong and recent China to various theocratic states today, and other threats to democracy and a truly self-destined life. What about individual identity, and the unfolding of a Self if that Self is to live inside the terms of a rigid social architecture? What about a liberation of positive human potential the ideal architecture was explicitly designed for?

Dystopias are not the only necessary outcome of creating ideal spaces on a social level. There is no inevitable contradiction between individual and society, individual liberty and community/collective. Individual and group/collective/society might be two distinct poles of human life, but they are not strict antinomies. ‘Individual:collective’ may be ‘indissoluble binomial’ as Le Corbusier stated, but they are no enemies. Victor Considerant, an early Socialist from the 19th century, and disciple of the utopian constructor Charles Fourier who was a forerunner of the outlined basic ideas of Le Corbusier stated: ‘The principal idea of community is half of the social idea (Collectivity) as the idea of fragmentation (Individuality) is the other half. The union of these two simple elements in a superior and ordered combination leads to the principle of Association.’^[13]

How to create an ideal city that does not end up in a dystopia, but leads to such an association in its positive outcome? Where can community/collectivity and fragmentation/individuality be readjusted in a new harmonious symmetry? By building an ideal city as a consistent organism, giving way to a ‘second era of the machine’ as Le Corbusier said, an ‘era of harmony.’^[14] In our modern (first) machine age, he says, we achieved a ‘mastery of the means’ but at the same time, caused ‘the destruction of the harmony of our lives.’ Therefore, it needs a renewal – the doorway to utopia.

For Le Corbusier, such an era of harmony should be achieved by uniting nature, also human nature, with culture by means of geometry. Although a city resembles an organism, it needs clarity of construction, a “Cartesian order,” as he says, straight lines, clear contexts; the curve, the winding line, that which has historically grown by chance are to be rejected as design specifications. Winding lines and that which arose by chance are democracy, or even worse, anarchy and chaos; nature grows like this, but not the city.^[15]

Instead, it is the task of man to bring geometry into chaos, translated: into a primordial, anarchic nature. The new paradise to be constructed is an artificial nature, not nature in its original state of being. Nature as it is, growing in a self-organizing “chaotic” way, cannot rule when it is about an ideal space for humans, in the gestalt of an ideal city. ‘Geometry is the response of reason to nature. At the same time, it is the continuation of nature as principle and the antithesis to nature as coincidence.’^[16] It needs an ordering principle to prevent chaos. Life is movement, but a movement that is to be ordered. Settling upon a position of the French Ecole des Beaux-Arts developed a century before, for Le Corbusier, too, unity in diversity is to be achieved; in such a way, the works of architecture are balanced with the “social worlds,” he says.^[17] In other words, to cope with the chaos of life, it needs unity in diversity. But without destroying diversity, the very essence of life. As said, unity does not equal uniformity, that major pitfall of traditional end states addressed earlier.

It is not only about the personal world view of a single architect. It is about occidental cultural heritage, about inner images (“ideas”) deeply embedded in an occidental understanding, and conception, of the world as such. Ideas that turned into basic assumptions about the nature of the human being, the conditio humana, about nature as part of the world, about the role of the human in that world; and as a result, they turned into assumptions about architecture. In architecture, ideas interact with forms, and according to an architect, ‘architecture would remain incomprehensible without etymology,’ without basic inner images, ideas people hold about the world. The roots of these ideas ‘preserve their vitality intact, and through subsequent changes and extensions of related concepts always re-emerge in their original form.’^[18]

First and foremost, it is about nature and culture, natura and cultura. The distinction between nature and culture has existed in all cultures, but is not so apparent as in the Occident, where a ‘completely exotic cosmology’ based on this distinction provided modernity with a central lead idea upon which it could establish itself.^[19] It also applies to a central element of culture, namely architecture. The architectural form, said the Greek engineer and architect Eupalinos in the 6th century B.C., distances itself from nature. For the Roman architect Vitruvius, influential for an occidental architecture since the Renaissance, architecture is not nature; one can use natural forms in architecture but architecture essentially differs from nature.^[20] What to do with nature, Le Corbusier’s “chaotic” force? Therefore, nature is to be incorporated in the new paradise. But it is a tamed, domesticated nature; because the architecture of paradise is an effort to achieve the most appropriate relationship between humans, nature, and art.^[21]

The New City

Eden, says McClung in The Architecture of Paradise, must become a garden city. After ‘the failure of an arcadian or pastoral model of beatific existence within the context of a purged and renewed heaven and earth, the survival of Eden depends, therefore, upon whatever accommodation can be reached with the city.’^[22]

Chandigarh was planned as a kind of garden city, following the harmonization of nature with culture, individual and society in that “second machine age” addressed by Le Corbusier; and, above that, it should be an expression of a truly modern city of that second age. Le Corbusier, in his 1959 Edict of Chandigarh stated: ‘The city of Chandigarh is planned to human scale. It puts us in touch with the infinite cosmos and nature. It provides us with places and buildings for all human activities by which the citizens can live a full and harmonious life. Here the radiance of nature and heart are within our reach.’^[23]

Before Chandigarh, Le Corbusier developed plans for other ideal cities, the Ville Contemporaine for 3 million Inhabitants (1922), the Plan Voisin (1925) for a new Paris, plans that revealed how a new modern city of a ‘mechanical civilization’ should look like, following a strict geometry, aesthetics, and consequent functionalization. Although never built, they were quite influential for modern urban planning. Next to these concepts, he participated in the planning and construction of concrete cities such as Sao Paulo, Algiers, and others.^[24]

Chandigarh was an ideal city realized. From Le Corbusier’s works, Chandigarh ‘remains his largest assemblage of buildings on one site and his most fully realised urban plan.’ Next to Brasilia, Brazil’s capital city from the same epoch created by Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio da Costa, Chandigarh is an architecture that stands for the visions of a postcolonial era. It defined ‘a new vision for the future of urban living and became one of the twentieth century’s most powerful expressions of modernism.’^[25] Following the separation of Pakistan and India, Chandigarh was intended to become the new capital of the Indian region of Punjab, a region near Pakistan, and the decision to build it was made by the Indian prime minister of those days, Pandit J. Nehru, who collaborated with Le Corbusier until the city was finished. Without these two men who stayed together since they first met in 1951, Chandigarh probably would never have been built.^[26]

As in case of all realized concrete utopias, it needs will and the destination of concrete individuals taking the lead in such a venture, including the will for symbolical expression: what the new society should be all about, what is such a society’s political architecture, and what kind of social as well as individual identity is to gain expression here, with this new city to be built for a new nation. A concrete utopia played a central role for occidental modern thinking. According to Karl Mannheim, one of the first investigators of the relations between utopia and ideology, it belongs to the very nature of utopia to leave the character of the merely possible and to become concrete. A concrete utopia is one that tries to transform an existing ‘historical reality in the direction of your own imagination.’^[27] This is what Chandigarh tried to do. In a speech titled ‘A Tryst with Destiny’ held by Nehru, it was about ‘dedication to the service of India and her people, and to the still larger cause of humanity.’^[28]

Interestingly, a Western architect had been installed to create an Indian ideal city, following Nehru’s maxim of constructing a modern city that was untouched from India’s colonial past According to my hosts during my visit in Chandigarh, these were main aims of Nehru to build the city at all: it had to be modern, and to be postcolonial. Was this the reason why a Western architect, with a basically Western conception had to erect the new capital? It was a case that was followed up by many others as time passed: that Western understandings of the world, symbolically condensed in Western-styled architectures, were used by Non-Western societies, primarily in their representative buildings. Is this a kind of cultural colonization, even after the formal end of colonialism? In the case of Chandigarh, a Western-styled modern city should replace the Western-styled architectures of the former British colonial past. It was not only about architecture in the sense of the visible built form, also organizational architectures belonging to “democracy” and “democratic institutions” had been taken from their Western understandings and adapted to local political contexts. In the case of Chandigarh, symbolized by the Legislative Assembly Hall (1962), the High Court (1955), and the Secretariat (1958).^[29]

Chandigarh was planned originally for an estimated number of half a million inhabitants and was divided into sectors, its basic building units, each sector measuring 800 x 1200 metres, with a population between 3.000 and 20.000 persons. Important in social terms is the idea of the neighbourhood: each sector is a self-sufficient neighbourhood unit with every facility it needs to be a real community of people; schools, health centres and places of recreation and worship.^[30]

Each sector was planned as a city within a city, therefore all the sectors, laid out in a rectangular grid, have been interconnected by a system of roads of different hierarchies. In Chandigarh, there were three phases of construction, extending also after Le Corbusier’s time, with a total of 56 sectors. In addition, the sectors were divided by areas, expressing a social hierarchy of different social classes, each area having its distinct style of houses.^[31] The social segregation was an issue mentioned by my hosts, too, showing me different social areas with different kinds of architectures. It resembles a crucial question for all ideal cities and their envisaged societies: which kinds of architecture for which kinds of human beings? One intention of an ideal city’s architecture is to generate identity, but “identity” does not mean that all people are equal, independent from the concept of a self-sufficient neighbourhood. If architecture settles upon basic assumptions about an assumed generalized ‘nature’ of the human being, a conditio humana, then this is of particular importance for architectures of ideal spaces – like Chandigarh was intended to become: a new space for a new society.

Next to the idea of sectorial neighbourhood and self-sustainment, the city was designed like an artificial landscape, with ‘green spaces to be an integral part of its urban plan, supporting the complete well-being of the city’s inhabitants.’^[32] In line with the mythic image of an artificial Eden addressed earlier, it is an artificial nature that had to be created with Chandigarh, a place suited to the nature of the human being to be a cultural animal and a zoon politikon (to recur to this famous Aristotelian term), an animal living in the city. The making of a defined space is what makes man to man, says Leroi-Gourhan, the creation of an artificial human cosmos.^[33] In case of Chandigarh and Le Corbusier’s conception about geometry and nature outlined earlier, it is an artificial nature that is outlined here, an ideal space for humans, both in terms of nature and human nature; a new Eden.

Applying the ideal of geometry does not mean that a monotonous grid is the only outcome. In its total, the city of Chandigarh was not completely rectangular. On its top, like the head of a human body, an ideal of city planning of the Italian Renaissance Le Corbusier referred to, there was the so-called Capitol, the seat of the Punjabi government. Running through the city like a spine, following the flow of a river, the Leisure Valley ‘was devised as a place for pedestrians to escape the congestion and noise of the city.’ The same function was assigned to the nearby Sukhna Lake, at the upper right of the plan.^[34] Looking at the city in its entirety, the ideal space of an artificial ideal landscape had to be created, to unite nature and culture, with nature becoming a part of culture; and the utopian hope to come to a second machine age, after the destructions caused by the first machine age and its industrialisation, and to arrive at an era of harmony.^[35]

The Capitol can be seen as the symbolic core of the city, in its total, it is a ‘cosmic and political landscape.’ The overall theme of this landscape was ‘the idealisation of the institutions of the state. The aim was to establish a set of relationships across space between symbolic forms.’^[36] When I was invited to visit this political landscape, the first impression was its magnitude, its sheer spatial extension. The main buildings were the High Court with a huge square in front of it, the Legislative Assembly Hall located opposite in a distance, at the square’s other end; and the Secretariat in the vicinity of the Assembly Hall, a huge building where the actual daily government of the state was intended to take place. Next to these buildings and the Tower of Shadows near the Assembly Hall, there were symbolic monuments like the Open Hand, located near the High Court, and in the square area of the Assembly Hall, the Martyrs’ Monument, related to India’s independence, and the Geometric Hill, showing the design principles of Le Corbusier in an artwork of its own.

Even from above, it is difficult to gain a feeling about the dimension of the whole area. Taken from the rooftop of the Secretariat building, in the near (lower left and centre) there is the Assembly Hall complex; opposite to it, at the end of the large and long square connecting the two buildings, the High Court is located (upper right). In the middle (centre right), there is the Tower of Shadows, next to the Martyrs’ Monument left of it with its large ramp. In the background, one can see the Open Hand in the greenery. On the ground, one gains an impression about the dimensionality of the whole area.

View towards Tower of Shadows (back left) and Assembly Hall (back middle). In the left back behind the trees, there is the Secretariat. On the right in the foreground, a part of the Martyrs’ Monument can be seen. The Svastika sign is no invention of the Nazis, but an old Hindu symbol for the sun. Note the dimensions of the persons standing right of the Tower of Shadows.

All in all, the Capitol is an artificial landscape of cosmic and political properties, a world on its own somehow separated from the rest of the ideal city. ‘The location of the Capitol Complex at the head of the city […] was considered by Le Corbusier to be a suitably significant and inspiring site for the primary edifices of the new capital.’^[37] The buildings of the Capitol ‘[…] contribute to an overall concept and experience in which the ground has been sculpted into solids and voids affording ever-changing views and juxtapositions.’^[38]

When I was guided through the area by my Indian hosts who explained me the whole complex, I had the feeling that here, something new and unprecedented wanted to arise, a large artifact rich in symbolic meanings standing for a new era; not only in Indian history, but for human history as such: the second machine age (Le Corbusier) as redemption from all what has been before. Le Corbusier ‘hoped to impose a clear order on the chaos of technical modernisation […].’^[39] As an Indian member of the team that built Chandigarh said: ‘The concept of the Capitol Complex in Chandigarh reveals Corbusier’s approach to his philosophy of the livability of man. The various elements and symbols built into each of these structures are reflective of his philosophy of human existence which reaches out to the eternal in man.’^[40]

In stark contrast to that landscape’s monumentality and the power of its buildings stands the Capitol’s central symbol for a new age, the monument of the so-called Open Hand. It is a symbol for a new society, as well as an epitome for a Self that truly and fully came to itself, free from outward suppression and inner limitations. It was first developed by Le Corbusier in 1943, under his impression of the Third Reich’s rule over Paris.^[42] That is, under the experience of suppression of humans, by humans.

I first met my Indian hosts at the Open Hand, discussing in its shadow. The open hand is an old Hindu symbol, they explained to me, standing for peace – an open hand cannot hold a weapon – giving, and receiving. I can give open handed, I can receive gifts from others, and in such a mutual exchange, we do not fight against each other. As a Self, I am free to give, and to receive, I opened my mind and soul. The symbol can also be seen as a bird, they told me, a bird ready to fly in new directions. Moreover, as my Indian hosts explained me, the hand is mounted like a weathercock, it can move in the wind. Which shall underpin the feature of openness, of giving and receiving to, and from, ever-changing directions, ready for openness and change.

‘The ‘Open Hand’ epitomises Le Corbusier’s attempt at combining a public iconography with an abstraction permitting several levels of reading and a formal presence permitting multiple relationships to other ‘objects’ against the sky, such as those on top of the Parliament or the Governor’s Palace. As well as a floating hand, Picasso’s famous ‘Peace Dove’ comes to mind. The image also suggests a tree, or an ancient gesture of acceptance and benediction […].’ In Le Corbusier’s own words, the open hand ‘is a symbol very appropriate to the new situation of a liberated and independent earth. A gesture which appeals to fraternal collaboration and solidarity between all men and all nations of the earth.’^[43]

The Ideal City in Life

In Le Corbusier’s comment about his Open Hand the utopian gesture reappears again, the hope of preparing the way for a new era of harmony in his second machine age. It is about a concrete utopia, one more new start into a new age. ‘The monuments on the Capitol idealize the institutions of power and reinforce official histories and projections by translating these into the stuff of substantial myth. The cosmological symbols and powerful forms seem to suggest a lost paradise, a landscape of origins, even as they point to an ideal future and evoke an eternal present.’^[44]

Before this could be achieved, another landscape of origins had to be removed; completely, following the tabula rasa-approach of any utopia: clear the ground where the new world is to be built up, remove from that ground all what existed before, to have a truly new start, a purge from what has history and the world been so far, before the advent of the redemptive utopia. The villages scattered on the area of the later city were all destroyed. Yet it must be stated that Le Corbusier studied and admired village life as the original Indian sociality, as well as the local culture associated with it.^[45] A symbolic expression is the location where he started to work, his first building for the city to come and deliberately resembling the old village life that had to vanish, called by him “the tent.”

The basic idea of neighbourhood underlying the sectors in Chandigarh was frequently emphasized by my hosts during my visit in Chandigarh, and compared – by them – with an “original” and “genuine” Indian life: namely to live in villages scattered in the countryside, leading a rural life near to nature like Gandhi, the founding father of the state of modern India, who had propagated it. This, my hosts said, is the true Indian identity, not to live in large modern overcrowded cities. To live in a community, meeting at a Banyan tree in the village’s centre. It is a myth about the origins of identity (here, the Indian one), about a state of naturalness, a source of belonging and identity that has been lost, like the biblical Eden. And a myth is not identical with a lie. As is utopia, as long as it is believed in, it can give strength and guidance. Why then, in order to re-construct an “Indian identity” unspoiled by Western colonizers, to build an ideal city following Western conceptions and understandings of society one could ask – because such conceptions are “modern,” that is, progressive and up to date? According to Nehru, Chandigarh had to become ‘a temple of the new India, unfettered by tradition.’^[46]

The new identity and its temple are not the old ones, it needs a new temple and a new symbolism. And first and foremost, it needs a new society with new individuals, new Selfs with a new self-understanding. In the case of what had to be presented by Chandigarh, the old pastoral India had to be over; paradise was lost, now, it had to be regained. The new city was a statement, an ideal space for a modern society. Perhaps out of this, everything was planned – a designed identity down to the detail.

When I was taken by my hosts to Le Corbusier’s café, everything was designed – the space, the walls, the windows, even the coffee tables and chairs. The small things of everyday life should mirror the same spirit that ruled the whole, the city as such with its buildings, streets, and tree-shaded avenues.

But identity cannot be constructed, it cannot get designed; one cannot create an identity; identity is to develop, to evolve over time in the course of history, the personal history of the single individual, the Self, included. In case of an ideal city providing the “proper” architecture for “proper” individuals who shall fit to it, the essential point is the Menschenbild in question, the image of the human – which are our basic assumptions about the human – and out of this, the conditio humana that shall be achieved by means of architecture. It boils down to the question of what kind of architecture shall be installed for what kind of human beings. In case of Chandigarh, we are confronted with basic assumptions about a modern conditio humana – what it ought to be and what it shall become when living in the daily contexts of an ideal “modern” city. Here, Western assumptions come into play, as addressed, as well as assumptions about “the” typical modern Indian citizen of a modern India; and how such an ideal human condition could look like in a modern Indian ideal city of Western origin.

The original photo, shot when the ideal city was still young and the buildings were still fresh, presents the ideal of a Western-styled suburbanity (Government houses in sector 16, 1960) with an ideal Western individual, a self-sustaining Self^[47] parading along the modernist architecture presented here. It is a life world far away from the Indian origins my hosts told me about.

Besides the wish of the city’s founders to build a space for a “modern” individual and society, taking over Western democratic concepts adapted to an Indian context, as in case of every ideal city, and besides the magnificent conception and layout of Chandigarh as a whole, when real life intrudes into the ideal concept, things become quite different than they have been planned. The ideal space becomes subjected to evolution, its original architectural order gets diluted and fragmented, the actual dynamics of life going on in that space deviate from its planned ideal development envisaged by its founders and constructors. The ideal development, following the problem of the ideal state as an end state outlined earlier, was that sectors could be added when the city was expected to grow, my hosts told me. But such a possibility of enlargement is not real evolution but just to grow inside the terms of the ideal space already outlined. It does not allow for the new to emerge, does exclude the possibility of a real evolution – that something truly new, unpredictable will emerge. Real evolution is the emergence of the new, in the end, of the unforeseen, the unplanned, the non-anticipated. If a development must take place inside the terms of an already pregiven framework, it is not evolution but merely more of the same. Expressed in Le Corbusier’s 1959 Edict of Chandigarh: ‘The object of this edict is to enlighten the present and future citizens of Chandigarh about the basic concepts of planning of the city so that they become its guardians and save from whims of individuals.’ ^[48] As has been addressed earlier, ideal end states and evolution are not just in a dualistic, but in a dichotomic relationship. Either there is the ideal end state – of a human Self, an ideal city as that Self’s place to live, an ideal state as the sum of such humans in a society – or there is evolution. Evolution happened, also in case of Chandigarh.

In the outskirts of Chandigarh, a new plan for a new kind of city took shape, consisting of “high-risers” (as my hosts called them), identical vertical housing blocks 20 and more stories in height. Just housing blocks with a little green between them; no community or peaceful village life next to nature, no Banyan tree where to meet. Euphemistically, the area was called New City – but it was no city, just an assemblage of individual high-risers located next to each other. Opposed to Le Corbusier’s city, just ugly, formatted, and monotonous. Again, the question arises which kinds of architecture shall serve which kinds of human beings. The New City – a new city according to plan, like Le Corbusier’s city – enclosing the old new city of Chandigarh like a siege ring. The New City was the result of profit-driven investors, and of a “new housing” government program to cope with the increasing population; and of corruption, I was told, bribing the officials responsible for giving the permits to build. The “whims of individuals” Le Corbusier warned about, they happened.

The aim was to create housing for new immigrants into the Chandigarh area; and to replace the people living in villages on the ground of the New City area into these housing blocks, by destroying the villages in favour of the tabula rasa of the New City (another formal parallel to the old new Chandigarh) and removing the villagers into the blocks. We visited Dr. Amit Gupta, a physician having his doctor’s office in the New City. He studied the health effects of living in the blocks. There are not even playgrounds for children, he said, people cannot walk in the green because there is none, community life is zero, social quarrels and suicides are increasing because living ‘in a box is not Indian culture’ (Gupta). As one of my hosts, Charanjeev Singh, had it: ‘you live in a prison you must pay for, earning your money for doing so.’ Is this the new human identity, not only in Chandigarh? The conditio humana of a new modernity, at least for large segments of a population living in the conditions of a “second machine age” of another kind, that of a regime of capitalism and autocracy?^[49] What about the Self, existing in the terms of such conditions? We will see.

References

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Footnotes

1. See his presentation on Chandigarh in episode 3 of the Ideal Spaces symposium about the Neoliberal Agenda, https://www.idealspaces.org/projects/neoliberal-agenda-symposium/ ↑

2. Schmarsow (1914): 66 ↑

3. Mondrian quoted in Warncke (2012): 174 ↑

4. Manuel/Manuel (1997): 157 ↑

5. From his New Horizons of Architecture, in: Breuer (2001): 187 ↑

6. Feuerstein (2008): 46 ↑

7. Vercelloni (1994): 1 ↑

8. Mezzetti (2005): 9 ↑

9. Milelli (2005): 187 ↑

10. Quoted in Vidler (2011): 275; too the literal quotation following ↑

11. Vidler (op. cit.): 275 ↑

12. Quoted in Vidler (op. cit.): 277 ↑

13. Le Corbusier and Considerant quoted in Vidler (op. cit.): 277 ↑

14. Le Corbusier (1945): 9; also in the following. To symmetry: 15 ↑

15. Le Corbusier (1979): 18ff., to curves vs. geometry and straight lines; 9, to democracy and anarchy; 9, 172f., to nature and chaos. It is interesting that for Le Corbusier, democracy and an original nature are on the same side, as regards chaos. ↑

16. Von Moos (1968): 396, about Le Corbusier and geometry. ↑

17. In Vidler (op. cit.): 276, also to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts ↑

18. Gottfried Semper, quoted in Portoghesi (2000): 118 ↑

19. Descola (2013): 107 ↑

20. Cited in Portoghesi (op. cit.): 137, to Eupalinos; and 92f., to Vitruvius ↑

21. McClung (1983): 2 ↑

22. Mc Clung (op. cit.): 19 ↑

23. Quoted in Fynn (op. cit.): 94f. ↑

24. Vidler (op. cit): 285, Feuerstein (op. cit.): 214. And Le Corbusier (1945): 10, to the mechanical civilization ↑

25. Fynn (2017): 11, also to history and context ↑

26. Casciato (2017): 8. ↑

27. Mannheim (1929): 169. To the concrete utopia as an elaborated idea, an eidos see Holz (1967): 63 ↑

28. Quoted in Casciato (op. cit): 9. The speech was held in August 15, 1947, when the British rule ended. ↑

29. To these buildings and their democratic intention, see Fynn (op. cit.): 17. Next to Le Corbusier, chief architects were Pierre Jeanneret, his cousin, and Maxwell Fry (Casciato, op. cit.: 9), and Indian architects often not mentioned, like M.N. Sharma (Fynn, op. cit.: 232) ↑

30. Fynn (op. cit.): 11, to the total population; and 15, to the sectors and their neighbourhood concept ↑

31. Fynn (op. cit.): 14f.; 157 (housing) ↑

32. Fynn (op. cit.): 15 ↑

33. Leroi-Gourhan (1984): 397f., 404 ↑

34. Fynn (op. cit.): 15. To Chandigarh resembling a human body see Curtis (2018): 10 ↑

35. To these hopes see Curtis (op. cit.): 25 ↑

36. To that landscape, see Curtis (op. cit.): 3; 25, to the theme and the aim; and 10, to human body and Capitol ↑

37. Fynn (op. cit.): 17 ↑

38. Curtis (op. cit.): 26 ↑

39. Curtis (op. cit.): 25 ↑

40. Varma (2018): 198 ↑

41. This is one of Le Corbusier’s sketches how the Capitol could look like; the building at the end of this artificial landscape, the Governor’s Palace, has never been built because for Prime Minister Nehru, it would have violated the overall democratic appeal of the ideal city’s capitol area. Nehru ‘viewed such edifices as representative of undemocratic ideals.’ [Fynn (op. cit.): 17 ↑

42. Fynn (op. cit.): 17. ↑

43. Curtis (op. cit.): 24; and quoting Le Corbusier 24f. ↑

44. Curtis (op. cit.): 26 ↑

45. Quite apparent in his drawings of Indian village life and its symbols, shown to me by my Indian hosts in Le Corbusier’s Art Atelier. To this, see also Doshi (2018): 37-39, who worked with him ↑

46. Quoted in Curtis (op. cit.): 9 ↑

47. To that Self and the related myth of the liberated individual see Gehmann (2022): 4, 18, 50, 54, 86, 108, 154, 178, 195-97, 229, 234, 248; and to its right of an absolute personal freedom 92; to its Christian heritage 130f.; to its Renaissance origins 155-57, 165, 188, 192f. (subjectivation) ↑

48. Quoted in Fynn (op. cit.): 192f. ↑

49. To this, see the journal‘s 3rd issue about the Neoliberal Agenda ↑