Chandigarh-Haryana
Chandigarh-Haryana
Chandigarh is a city in India that serves as the capital of two states: Punjab and Haryana. However, the city does not belong to either state. Rather, the city is administered by the federal government and hence classified as a union territory. Chandigarh was due to transfer to Punjab alone in 1986, accompanied by the creation of a new capital for Haryana, but the transfer has been delayed while agreement is sought on the districts of Punjab that should be transferred to Haryana in exchange.
Brief History
The city was commissioned by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, to reflect the new nation’s modern, progressive outlook. Nehru famously proclaimed Chandigarh to be “unfettered by the traditions of the past, a symbol of the nation’s faith in the future.” Several buildings in Chandigarh were designed by the Swiss-born French architect and planner, Le Corbusier in the 1950s.
Le Corbusier was in fact the second architect of the city, after the initial master plan was prepared by the American architect-planner Albert Mayer who was working with the Polish-born architect Matthew Nowicki. It was only after Nowicki’s untimely death in 1950 that Le Corbusier was pulled into the project.
Plan and Architecture
Taking over from Albert Mayer, Le Corbusier produced a plan for Chandigarh that conformed to the modern city planning principles of CIAM, in terms of division of urban functions, an anthropomorphic plan form, and a hierarchy of road and pedestrian networks.
The intial plan had two phases: the first for a population of 150,000 and the second taking the total population to 500,000. Le Corbusier divided the city into units called ’sectors’, each representing a theoretically self-sufficient entity with space for living, working and leisure.
The sectors were linked to each other by a road and path network developed along the line of the 7 Vs, or a hierarchy of seven types of circulation patterns. At the highest point in this network was the V1, the highways connecting the city to others, and at the lowest were the V7s, the streets leading to individual houses. Later a V8 was added: cycle and pedestrian paths.