March 10, 2006

L is for Le Corbusier


Palace of Justice, Chandigarh

Arguably the father of Critical Regionalism, Le Corbusier's seminal work in India and South America have served as precedent for a generation of architects seeking to reconcile contemporary notions of architecture with the growing need for social and environment responsibility.


Assembly Building, Chandigarh

see Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture

3 comments:

ThomP said...

Heya I have been there. I backpacked around India, and as an architect I HAD to visit Chandigarh. It is an amazing yet strangely depressing place. The architecture is grand and wonderful and full of Corbusier trademarks, but also sits as an example of everything that was wrong with modernism as a planning guide. It's brutalism is the only thing that I encountered in my journey that quelled the cultural intensity of India. Don't get me wrong, I thought It was wonderful, But it was like walking into a cultural coma. This actually shows the unmitigated sucess of the scheme as a whole, but mitigates the value of the machine for existing as a culture. By this stage modernism had become arrogant, and left it's hefty boot print in Chandigarh. And as a side not. There is no water in there anymore. It is just filled with dead animals and rubbish, so I guess India is making Chandigarh its own again!

Unknown said...

wonderfully put. But you have to realize that Corb spent his entire career pushing his modernist, ignorance-of-context approach. So in that regard it is actually a respectable push towards societal responsibility. It does not accomplish what it should contextually, but at least it is a step in the right direction

Anonymous said...

2011 and it's still wronger than it ever was. Those poor people living in the wasteland of a foreign architect planned city. A word to all architects who have ruined so many regions around the world from Berlin to Chandigarh....Go live in the concrete horror you have created and leave people with hearts and souls to create their own magic. Say what you may about movements it's all the same. You don't live there. You wouldn't live there even though you have been paid millions of dollars!

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