Le Corbusier: When a Wound Tried to Become a City

A political border drawn across the map at the Partition of India cuts through cities, villages, families and memory, leaving Indian Punjab without Lahore, and Jawaharlal Nehru asks for a city free from the constraints of the past. Le Corbusier arrives near the foothills of the Himalayas with his notebook and the Modulor and plans Chandigarh as a body, with the Capitol as its head, gardens as lungs and roads as arteries, until the drawn body wakes and asks him where he will place its soul. Summoned before the Court of Modern Man, where the Modulor sits as judge and the measures of sorrow, dream and memory are missing from the wall, he hears bare concrete explain its rough skin, the angry Indian sun accept the brise-soleil as geometry, and the monsoon ask for a place for water. The High Court, the Secretariat and the Palace of Assembly testify in turn, the Assembly admitting that it can build a chamber for democracy and cannot force power to listen, and the Open Hand says that a hand that has known pain can become a fist or a door. Then the residents walk in with children, shops, bicycles and trees, a child draws a chalk circle across a straight line of the plan, and the verdict tells the architect that he built a city for the future without owning that future, so that Chandigarh becomes a place where the wound can begin again.