PIN-UP Magazine Fall/Winter Issue 11

Indian Winter

Article by Ruju Jasani | Photography by Martien Mulder

Capital of the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana, Chandigarh is the largest urban experiment Le Corbusier ever realized. Completed in 1965 — with significant contributions from his cousin Pierre Jeanneret and their longtime collaborator Charlotte Perriand — the city was more than just a Franco-Swiss Modernist’s counterpoint to 200 years of British colonial rule.

Chandigarh’s buildings served as a flashpoint of a nation’s “dream work” , embodying India’s vision of a future shorn free of its colonial past. Five decades after its completion, this epic modernist metropolis has melded into its surroundings, becoming increasingly familiar, and ever more beautiful.

Its forms inspire a dreamy remembrance of the celestial geometry of the Jantar Mantar in Jaipur, 500 kilometers and 200 years away to the south. In this, and in its transient vitality, there is something delicately Indian at play: discolored materials, dusty plazas, the weeping of passing monsoons, pitted exteriors of deep shad, blazing pockets of light, and roofs that turn skyward like the colored turbans of Punjabi men.