Sarabhai justified some alterations as being for her son’s sake. Le Corbusier replied that the boy, while charming, was still young and had not seen a lot of the world. It was a grievous error to pander to his whims. Instead, she should tell Anand to make an effort to adapt to the spirit of his new home. If handled accordingly, Anand would adjust.
Sarabhai was intensely annoyed. She let Le Corbusier know that, while she had fulfilled every point of their contract and had followed his advice by painting the upper floors and doors his chosen colors and had been a good sport when she had problems with one of the open arches during the heavy rains, he still had not done his promised garden layout or designed any of the customized furniture she wanted. This is where their correspondence ended—with both parties feeling wounded.
3
Le Corbusier spilled out some of his problems with the Sarabhai commission to Taya Zinkin, a journalist from the Manchester Guardian Weekly, whom he met at a party in Bombay. Zinkin’s account, which was published only after the architect died a decade later, has entered the Le Corbusier mythology, but it is of questionable validity.
The writer says that when she was introduced to him, she knew only that he was a “tall, handsome, elderly” Frenchman who was standing by himself drinking cognac, and that he spoke no English. This was a fallacy: by then, Le Corbusier was able to converse in English and often did so in India, as in the United States and Britain.
Zinkin wrote that Le Corbusier was in a rage because he was having trouble transferring funds paid him by Sarabhai to France. He was, the journalist claims, on his way to Delhi to urge Nehru to intervene. She says he also told her that Sarabhai had implored him to install railings or a low wall around the balconies of her villa. Zinkin quotes Le Corbusier as saying, “The good woman was afraid that when her sons get married their children would fall off and kill themselves, as if I cared. As if I, Le Corbusier, would compromise with design for the sake of her unborn brats!” Zinkin also quotes Le Corbusier as calling Yvonne “pretty stupid” and saying, “Madame wants children! She keeps pestering me for children. I hate children. She already has a little dog, that should be good enough.”5 In spite of The Guardian’s reputation for the highest journalistic standards, a lot of this is implausible. Le Corbusier was not publicly disloyal to Yvonne, and he had many successful connections to children even if he had none of his own.
Zinkin had an apparent reason for wanting to skewer Le Corbusier. The day after they met, they were on the same flight to Delhi. She claims that, as they were leaving the plane, he asked what she was doing that night. When the journalist replied that she had a train to catch, he said, “Pity. You are fat and I like my women fat. We could have spent a pleasant night together.”6 She claims not to have been offended, and when, a few days later, she was given the chance to interview him in his office in Chandigarh, she eagerly accepted.
She arrived for that meeting armed with questions about his work. Before she had even asked the first one, Le Corbusier said, “We are not going to discuss architecture. I hate talking shop to a woman.” He told her to come the next night to his room at Maiden’s Hotel in Delhi and said he would give her her choice of his drawings of bulls. “Now run along, don’t stand there wasting my time,” he then instructed her.7 She walked out, never to see him again.
This, anyway, was Taya Zinkin’s report on their relationship, published for all the world to know, becoming one of the staples of the architect’s reputation in his dealings with women.
4
Though he locked antlers with the rich and imperious Manorama Sarabhai, in Chandigarh Le Corbusier got along well with his client base. What he built brought delight and pride to the hundreds of thousands of people who were flooding into the new city. The thousands involved in its construction were also, in general, content. The workers considered Le Corbusier demanding but respectful, aloof but amiable. He was a visitor from the west who, rather than impose his ways, responded to theirs. And he was admired for the courage and genius that resulted in such remarkable architecture.
One of the people who worked closely under Le Corbusier, M. S. Sharma, was among the many who found the architect unlike anyone else he had met. Part of what struck him was the architect’s essential unknowability: “Nobody knew Le Corbusier in all his aspects. The only one who might possibly have known most sides was Pierre Jeanneret.” What Sharma did know with certainty was what it meant to work for Le Corbusier. “He was a very hard taskmaster. Each time he came, people were eagerly awaiting, and didn’t know what to expect. He himself didn’t have a moment to spare and expected everyone else to be very serious.”8
One day, the younger man had a meeting to discuss the new Post, Telegraph, and Telephone Building with top officials in the telecommunications industry. The project was to be the tallest in the city center, eleven stories high. Sharma was to take the bus to the site. Le Corbusier, noticing that Sharma was late to leave for his appointment, told him the hour—three times, in rapid sequence. Georges Jeanneret’s punctiliousness was inviolate.
Le Corbusier’s sheer brilliance, however, made Sharma feel it was a privilege to do as he beckoned:
He was the most observant man I’ve ever seen. Always with a small sketchbook and pencils bound in an elastic. Wearing a khaki safari jacket with big pockets. A most elegant person; at meetings, he had his bow tie and impeccable suits. And when he sketched a bull that was just outside his office window, it was a very elegant bull.
Except for Leonardo and Michelangelo, I’ve never known of anyone so deeply immersed in life—and so versatile. Everything has the master’s touch. Every work he did reflects his greatness.9
SHARMA OFTEN HAD DINNER with Le Corbusier and the other architects and builders at Pierre Jeanneret’s house, where they drank Pierre’s homemade wines. Le Corbusier talked nonstop, dashing from subject to subject and addressing minute details and major philosophical issues in the same breath. One never knew in what direction his discourse would go. He would be carrying on about one subject while clearly thinking of something else, formulating an answer while speaking about an unrelated matter, as if he could operate simultaneously on two different levels. Sharma was once aware of the master digressing completely from the theme at hand for a full seven minutes, only to return to the initial topic and provide a precise answer to the question that had been posed.
One afternoon, Le Corbusier had a small seashell in his pocket that, for no particular reason, he gave to Sharma’s four-year-old son, Manu. “Do you see how beautiful it is?” the distinguished architect asked in Swiss-accented English. Manu Sharma, more than forty years later, still has that small shell as a precious relic.
For Sharma, Le Corbusier, despite his occasional cantankerousness, remained an idol: “He walked straight. He talked straight. His attitude was so masculine. There was nothing feminine about it. This was not a man who could be humbled by any power. He was the embodiment of the spirit that Lord Krishna preached—Karma theory—you have to work for any achievement. Deep concentration on the work at hand, devotion to a building project, was akin to worship, to religion.”10
5
Le Corbusier knew that the “Open Hand,” the monument that would be the crowning element of the capital, still required Nehru’s endorsement. P. M. Thapar advised him on the best moment to turn to Nehru with the proposal for this gigantic thick-fingered hand—its form simplified and generalized but still recognizable, elevated on a sort of stand, symbolizing a new, more generous approach to human existence. Le Corbusier set up a meeting in Delhi during a visit in the late 1950s, when Chandigarh was well advanced.
To persuade the prime minister, Le Corbusier told a cautionary tale. He explained that at the World Congress of Peace Supporters, six years earlier, the judges of a design competition had made the mistake of rejecting his proposal. Le Corbusier provided Nehru with a document, as well as its translation into English, presenting his philosophy on politics. Nations and their differences, he explained, were mi
nor issues by comparison to certain universal needs.
Le Corbusier informed Nehru that not only was this document of great intellectual value, but it had led to a development of even greater importance than the words themselves: an open hand floating over the horizon, symbolizing the universality about which he had written. It would reach a height of twenty-five meters, would be built out of “enameled wrought iron,” and would move according to the wind.11
Le Corbusier told Nehru that Varma, the chief engineer of Punjab, was already prepared to build the Open Hand. The architect also informed Nehru that he had presented the concept to the Cabinet of Ministers in November 1954 and had completed all the technical studies to make the monument work. Two French manufacturers were willing to make it; Le Corbusier cheerfully let Nehru know that he was “stupefied” at the bargain price they offered.
Le Corbusier finished by declaring that if the prime minister authorized the building of the Open Hand, he would be making a major step toward the achievement of world peace: “I am certain that by raising the ‘Open Hand’ in this location, India will be making a gesture which will confirm your decisive intervention at the crucial moment of machine-age evolution and its dangerous implications…. I shall end these remarks with that declaration I made in one of my books: ‘Architecture is the expression of the spirit of an epoch.’”12
The monument was to be positioned precisely in the center of the most public part of Chandigarh, with an adjacent amphitheatre where the public could sit and face it. The architect made a plaster maquette of the form, with its large thumb thrust at a right angle, slightly resembling a flying bird. The three middle fingers, stubby and of equal length, were a sort of cockscomb, and the wide pinkie, angled backward, the tail. The finished work was to be made of metal and enameled in bright red, white, green, and yellow. Le Corbusier issued further statements about its importance, saying it represented abundance and was open to receive the bounty of the earth and to distribute it to the people of India and other countries. It affirmed the beginning of “the era of harmony.”13
However buoyant and optimistic the monument’s spirit, it required all the hyperbole and justification because it failed without them.
In spite of the propaganda campaign, the Open Hand fell into the category of Le Corbusier’s unrealized dreams; Nehru did nothing about getting it constructed. But unlike the League of Nations and a range of other projects, it eventually rose after its designer’s death. Today, it floats over the land amid the architectural masterpieces of Chandigarh. Although it lacks the force of those buildings, one imagines that Le Corbusier would only have been pleased.
LI
1
During one of his visits to the Sarabhais, Le Corbusier was on his way one morning to the local airport when he saw the vast power station of the Ahmedabad Electricity Company. Its monumental cooling tower had the form of a grain silo but with all the surfaces curved and stretched. Le Corbusier was riveted by the gigantic elastic structure. He was just then developing the General Assembly at Chandigarh, and he imagined how this shape might be applied to the entirely different domain of civic architecture. He immediately began sketching.
Anand Sarabhai was in the car that morning. The architect’s unique ability to see what others would fail to notice, and the fancifulness that accompanied his perceptiveness, were striking to the boy. At the airport, where there was a tiny restaurant, Le Corbusier fixated on the orange and green of the plastic salt and pepper shakers, moving them back and forth like chess pieces, staring at them. Everywhere he looked, color and form affected him.
In little time, a short, seemingly open-topped structure—concave around its entire surface and resembling the cooling tower—rose from the roof of the General Assembly. The base of the assembly is a Corbusean rectangular block, a lively amalgam of pilotis, brises-soleil, and exterior spiral stairs. The anomalous form emerging victoriously from its flat roof, serving as its main auditorium, the meeting place of the Punjab Senate, has the triumphant energy of birth itself. It was a public space entirely without precedent (see color plate 22).
Le Corbusier had utilized not only the appearance but also the structural properties of cooling towers. He had visited such structures at night, when he could observe them freely, and spent considerable time checking their acoustics, sometimes banging two wooden planks together to hear the echoes. He then applied the principles of these industrial forms to the hyperbolic shell of the assembly, which is consistently one meter and fifteen centimeters thick.
That sheath has been molded in a form that maintains its tensile strength. At its top, the tower culminates in an oblique, angled section—as opposed to a flat, horizontal roof. That unusual roof is buttressed by an aluminum framework that is—Le Corbusier delighted in providing the explanation—“a veritable physics laboratory destined to deal with the play of natural light and with a degree of artificial light, with ventilation, with the electronic-acoustic machinery.”1 This “laboratory” was a rational and orderly structure intended not to impose an impossible order on the natural havoc of life but, rather, to serve and honor complexity.
The roof of the Assembly Building in Chandigarh, late 1950s
“Furthermore, this cork will lend itself to future solar festivities, reminding men once a year that they are children of the sun (a fact entirely forgotten by our extravagant civilization, crushed as it is by absurdities, particularly with regard to its architecture and its urbanism),” he wrote.2 The juxtaposition, in a single sentence, of all-consuming sun worship with the absurdities of a civilization deprived of its instincts reveals the simultaneous hope and tragedy inside the perpetual cacophony of Le Corbusier’s mind.
The interior of the hyperbolic cylinder of the Assembly has thrilling physical properties. Part of it reflects sound, another part absorbs it, to allow for ideal acoustics on ground level when the deputies meet. The shape serves the purposes of air-conditioning by allowing cool air to enter several meters above the level of human congress and descend to breathing level, while the warmer air rises to the level of a mechanical apparatus that removes it. The form that, from the outside, is startling and discomfiting, is, within, accommodating and succoring.
The cooling tower also gave Le Corbusier a chance to link architecture with the reigning political philosophy. Nehru had established “a five-year plan whose primary aim was to develop industry and produce electricity on a large scale. Thus, the cooling towers of an electric power plant must have seemed to Le Corbusier a particularly appropriate symbol for expressing the social and political aspirations of this friend and patron…. Gandhi’s philosophy of rejecting technology and focusing on the importance of agriculture, handicraft, and cottage industry finds many direct and indirect references in the Assembly. The hand-made quality of the béton brut, the folk imagery on the ceremonial gateway, the wall decorations based on imprints made by the workmen, and the juxtaposition of the oxcart with the building in one of Le Corbusier’s sketches all attest to a world view that shared a great deal with Gandhi’s own. For Le Corbusier, Gandhi’s philosophy of rural rejuvenation offered a felicitous balance to Nehru’s technological bias.”3
The Assembly Building in Chandigarh, late 1950s
Le Corbusier saw himself as possessed of the power to understand the validity of such overarching ideas even more clearly than world leaders like Gandhi and Nehru did: “Life has placed me in the position of an observer, giving me incomparable—and exceptional—means of judgment. I believe that this order of thought is not available to political leaders and that they live in the problem and hence do not see it.”4 He believed that his architecture, more than the ideas of any world leader, whatever his or her philosophy, was the salvation of humanity.
2
Because of security regulations put into effect after a bomb in front of the nearby Secretariat killed sixteen people in 1995, it is now difficult for laypeople to obtain permission to go inside the General Assembly. If as a tourist you do manage to get in, y
ou must carry nothing and empty your pockets completely; you are not even permitted to have a paper and pencil in hand. The absence of a camera or note-taking capability has its benefits, for you concentrate on an unforgettable unfolding of events. You do nothing other than look and absorb the sequence of astonishing experiences.
From the vast entry hall bathed in cathedral-like light, you proceed through a wide corridor that feels like a promenade, a glade in a forest: man-made architecture that conjures very tall trees with sunlight filtering through the foliage above. This space, which Le Corbusier planned for deputies to pass one another and meet for informal conversation en route to or from their assembly hall, encircles you in quietude and calm.
Then you enter the great meeting room. At first, it is frightening, like a weird cave. A visitor from the west could well wonder if this is suddenly the effects of the antimalaria medication or of the scorching Indian sun. The space is a hallucination. The ceiling soars in a myriad of directions. There are relief sculptures plastered onto its crazy ziggurat of forms that resemble shapes by Jean Arp animated and gone berserk. One cannot possibly fathom everything going on. Nothing has prepared you for the play of light and dark, the explosion of deep colors, the nonstop choreography of ostensibly inanimate materials.
The Hall of Parliament in Chandigarh, late 1950s
You are used to art as seen in museums: paintings on the walls, sculpture in the round. This time, you are inside the work of art. If you can imagine being totally enveloped by one of the great abstractions of Wassily Kandinsky or Jackson Pollock, being surrounded by its elements as if it is a vast tent, you approximate the life force and energy of this auditorium. But you are also in a functional space, a meeting hall where rational decisions are made, a place where the acoustics and air-conditioning work efficiently. Tough events take place inside this work of art, and people engage in conversation, however disputatious, and exchange ideas. In spite of the taxing exigencies of politics and nationalism and the divisive religious differences that dominate discussions here, it is a setting where human beings achieve congress.
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