Le Corbusier's Dream City — the Capitol Complex, the Rock Garden, and India's Most Planned Urban Experiment
Chandigarh is India's first planned city, designed from scratch by Le Corbusier after partition and completed in the 1950s as the new capital of Punjab. The Capitol Complex — Le Corbusier's masterpiece of Brutalist government buildings including the High Court, Secretariat, and Assembly — is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Rock Garden, built secretly over 18 years by road inspector Nek Chand from industrial waste, broken ceramics, and electrical insulators, opened in 1976 and is now one of India's most visited attractions — a surrealist counterpoint to Corbusier's rationalism in the same ci…
Chandigarh was commissioned by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1947 after partition ceded the original Punjab capital, Lahore, to Pakistan. Le Corbusier designed the master plan, the Capitol Complex, and the Open Hand monument — his iconic symbol of the city — and the project was his most complete built expression of his urbanism principles. The city was deliberately designed without a historical precedent, as a symbol of independent India's modernism. The Rock Garden's creator, Nek Chand, began building it illegally in the 1950s using rubble from villages demolished to clear Corbusier's b…