High Court in Chandigarh, image via Indian Express

Swiss-born Frenchman Charles Edouard Jeanneret Gris adopted the pseudonym Le Corbusier because he felt it would suit his architectural persona. An icon of modernism, he was invited by Jawaharlal Nehru to build India’s first planned city, Chandigarh, but paved the way for new possibilities in architecture elsewhere too. Yet, his legacy comes with its own burden. On Corbusier’s 50th death anniversary, two architects debate his ways of seeing.  

You enter the Mill Owners’ Association Building in Ahmedabad through the ramp, which takes you directly to the first floor. The ramp, asymmetric with a raw concrete parapet on one side and a sensuously cast aluminium handrail on the other, seems like a line suspended on slender steel supports that are reminiscent of wing struts from those WWI biplanes. The building has an archaic sense to it with its “brutal”, rough concrete, almost cast like old stone. Designed by Le Corbusier and completed in 1954, our movement through the building becomes the focus of our experience — it’s what the architect called “Promenade Architecturale”.....Continue Reading

> via indianexpress.com