witzerland is perhaps the only country in the world to have illustrated one of its banknotes with a building located thousands of miles away, in Chandigarh, India. Except the building in question is the work of one of the Alpine nation’s most famous sons: Le Corbusier. Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret in 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a town famed for its watchmaking, it was always assumed that Le Corbusier, as he became known, would follow previous generations of his family into the watch industry. After training as an engraver, he chose architecture instead.

A CHF 10 note (issued in 1995) featuring the Secretariat Building in Chandigarh, designed by Le Corbusier.

“The streets are orthogonal, the mind is free”

After fire destroyed the village of La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1794, a plan to reconstruct and develop the future town of La Chaux-de-Fonds was adopted in 1834. The author of this plan, Charles-Henri Junod, proposed a grid system that promoted public health and safety (gaps between the streets would act as firebreaks), but was also motivated by an ideal of social equality whereby every household would have the benefit of sunlight, space to plant vegetables and room to clear away snow. Junod’s plan also reflected the importance of watchmaking in La Chaux-de-Fonds’ economy and would transform the town into a vast Manufacture whose buildings housed workshops, often on the highest floors where there was the most natural light.

Did Junod’s progressive orthogonal layout influence Le Corbusier (whose first two buildings were in La Chaux-de-Fonds)? It’s a legitimate question. Both towns share a grid plan, a geometry typically associated with North American cities in which streets intersect at right angles. Did the Swiss architect have his home town in mind when designing his master plan for Chandigarh?

Plan of La Chaux-de-Fonds, drawn by Le Corbusier while a student, 1913. Le Corbusier’s master plan for Chandigarh, 1951.

©FLC/AGDAP

Although Le Corbusier could be scathing about his birthplace, he believed that when “the streets are orthogonal, the mind is free” — a thought echoed almost word for word by an inhabitant of Chandigarh, in a film about the city¹, who declares that its design “helps people to have a wider mind.”

In one of his better-known essays, The Pack-Donkey’s Way and Man’s Way², Le Corbusier opposes “the winding road (which) is the result of happy-go-lucky heedlessness, of looseness, lack of concentration and animality” to “the straight road (which) is a reaction, an action, a positive deed, the result of self-mastery. It is sane and noble.”

“Unfettered by the traditions of the past”

Today’s La Chaux-de-Fonds was conceived in the wake of a devastating fire. Chandigarh was born out of an event of much greater magnitude, namely Indian independence in 1947 and the partition with what became Pakistan, then Bangladesh. This division generated a massive population transfer that saw 15 million people displaced and a million dead. Having lost is historic capital of Lahore, now part of Pakistan, Punjab was in urgent need of a new capital city. Chandigarh, a vast and gently sloping terrain, scattered with a few humble villages, was chosen as the ideal location, having an abundant water supply and in close proximity to sites that could provide the raw materials for cement. India’s then Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, declared that the new town of Chandigarh would be “symbolic of the freedom of India unfettered by the traditions of the past….. an expression of the nation’s faith in the future.” For his Minister of Health, the new capital of Punjab would be nothing less than “the last word in beauty, in simplicity and in standards of such comfort as it is our duty to provide to every human being.”

The Secretariat Building

Chandigarh was thus founded on the same utopian principles as La Chaux-de-Fonds, as a city whose spaces would be equally shared and enjoyed by all.

A social utopia

After the American architect Albert Meyer withdrew from the project, following his associate’s accidental death, in 1950 an Indian delegation invited Le Corbusier to take over. Despite his initial reticence, the plan of Chandigarh and the construction of its Capitol Complex, home to the Secretariat Building, High Court and Legislative Assembly — so-called “Brutalist” masterworks that are devoid of any brutality, being entirely human-scaled —, would become what is doubtless his major and most democratic realisation.

Yet as interesting as its buildings are, Chandigarh’s most compelling feature is not its architecture but its plan.

Chandigarh’s grid plan on a manhole cover.

“The city, its architecture, has a quiet impact on the psyche, on the subconscious of the people,” notes one of the contributors to the aforementioned documentary. “All these designs, patterns, the colour, the volumes have an impact on their thinking and their behaviour. A Chandigarh person will be different from a Delhi person, the way they talk, the way they deal with other people, all these things are reflected in the behaviour of someone who has lived for a long time in Chandigarh.” A photograph (above) shows Le Corbusier holding his plan for Chandigarh and the Modulor, a scale of proportion which he devised in 1943, incorporating elements such as the golden ratio and based on the standard height of a man with his arm raised. Intended as an alternative to (and ultimately substitute for) imperial and metric systems, the Modulor anchored architecture to human proportions in a way that would enable functional and harmonious interactions between a person and their living space (his Unités d’Habitation are based on this system).

Le Corbusier holding the plan of Chandigarh and the Modulor.

©FLC/AGDAP

A city structured like a human body

This human-centric vision is illustrated by Chandigarh’s design as a human body. The Capitol Complex is the head, the city centre is the heart, the university and the industrial districts are the arms, green spaces are the lungs and the roads are the blood vessels.

Le Corbusier divided the city into 56 numbered sectors, formed where the main avenues intersect. These sectors are connected by a hierarchy of roads, for cars, public transport, cyclists or pedestrians, designed to smooth the flow of traffic. Trees line these thoroughfares, with different species planted in different sectors, and have become such a prominent feature of the landscape that a driver or a pedestrian could travel along the principal roads and see almost nothing but leaves and boughs.

The Tower of Shadow is the result of the architect’s in-depth studies of the sun’s trajectory throughout the different seasons in order to control the penetration of light into the buildings of the Capitol.

Measuring 800 x 1,200 metres, with a population of between 5,000 and 20,000, each sector is a self-contained unit, a neighbourhood of quiet pedestrian roads (often cul-de-sacs), public squares, areas for recreation, shopping streets and residential zones. A green corridor, Leisure Valley, bisects the city almost top to bottom, following the meandering traces of a river valley. “Chandigarh will be a city of trees, flowers, water and houses as simple as those of Homer’s time,” wrote Le Corbusier.

Where utopia ends and “life takes charge”

La Chaux-de-Fonds’ orthogonal plan was dictated by matters of public health and economic needs, as well as a democratic ideal that would be materialised by spatial egalitarianism, although this would be slowly eroded “by land speculation, real-estate greed and the primacy of private interests³.”

Chandigarh would follow a similar path. Designed for a population of 500,000, currently more than a million people live within the city limits. When the state government established its seat in Chandigarh, one of its first decisions was to authorise development on the green belt included in Le Corbusier’s plan. Now new districts, industrial zones, as well as slums, have sprung up around the city.

While Chandigarh remains architecturally intact (the municipality owns 60% of the buildings), communities have been gradually reshaped by gentrification. Le Corbusier designed 14 categories of housing, from small units to large villas, as a means to “break down barriers” and encourage a social mix that is rare in a country such as India with its powerful caste system — a principle that is increasingly undermined by sharp rises in housing costs.

Interior view of the Legislative Assembly.

Siddhartha Wig, an architect who was born and grew up in Chandigarh⁴, told us that “the city’s original plan is intact because everything was scrupulously planned, with strict rules. What began as a utopian concept has become slightly less utopian. Ultimately, though, the city is shaped by the needs of the people who live here. There is enormous demographic pressure in India and people are drawn to Chandigarh, which has the highest pro capita income in India. Because planning rules don’t allow densification, prices go up and people with modest incomes, the same ones who were supposed to benefit from a particular housing type, are being pushed out into the suburbs, slums develop... Life takes charge. We chose a foreign master and made him our own.”

While this utopia may be slowly fading, the majority of Chandigarh’s inhabitants have nothing but praise for their city: “Chandigarh is not like other Indian cities. It has much more open space, people have greater freedom”; “Chandigarh is a city on a human scale, connected to nature.” For Deepika Gandhi, also an architect, “Chandigarh to me means time. Delhi offers more opportunities but if I’m always rushing through traffic and chaos, what’s the point? Chandigarh gives us the priceless thing of time⁵.”

The priceless thing of time... surely Le Corbusier’s most precious gift, from La Chaux-de-Fonds all the way to Chandigarh.

Le Corbusier and the High Court.

Unknown photographer ©Fonds Pierre Jeanneret Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; Gift of Jacqueline Jeanneret

A testimonial from Yasho Saboo, Chairman and Managing Director of Taratec

“My parents moved to Chandigarh as one of the new city’s first citizens. I was less than two years old then.

I grew up surrounded by the designs and creations of Le Corbusier, not realising how special it was. But whenever I visited other places in India, I noticed as a child, that Chandigarh was different – cleaner, wide roads, different looking buildings with straight lines and raw concrete, trees, parks and lots of young people. 

I loved living and growing up here. It is only after my school years that I began to grasp the significance of Le Corbusier and Chandigarh. 

It is now clear to me that living here laid important foundations for my appreciation of art, innovation and history, and the values that I cherish most – a combination of Indian roots, culture and family tradition with the Swiss values of quality, respect for skill, design sensibility and common sense.”

• 1. The Power of Utopia: Living with Le Corbusier in Chandigarh, directed by Karin Bucher and Thomas Karrer (2023)
• 2. The City of Tomorrow, translated from the French by Frederick Etchells (1929)
• 3. By the authors of La Chaux-de-Fonds’ application to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Le Locle Urbanisme Horloger, published by Éditons G d’Encre.
• 4. Siddhartha Wig was our guide in Chandigarh and features in the film
• 5. All quotes are from the film