THE ART OF BUILDING

The Villa, built by the famous French Architect, Le Corbusier, (1887 - 1965) as a family home for a wealthy Indian cloth merchant in 1951, is off limits to visitors, but I managed, by special arrangement, to view it one day in the middle of the monsoon rains.  These were hardly ideal weather conditions in which to see a structure of this nature, which becomes, in the midst of a downpour, all gushing gutters, slippery steps and soggy roof gardens.

Along with the Villa Savoye (1929 - 1931) in Paris, equally inaccessible, these examples of Le Corbusier's domestic architecture expressed his concern for the house as a 'machine for living in' - the pilotis which raised the structure off the ground, freed this space for other purposes, the lack of external decoration, emphasized form, space and light and the interaction between indoors and outdoors, the flat roof provided space for a roof garden and in the case of the Indian version, provided a water chute down into a pool in the garden !   (Possibly inspired in part by the young son of the family who particularly enjoyed a French story book by Andre Maurois, entitled 'Patapoufs et Fillifers' or Fattypuffs and Thinifers, access to their world beneath the earth being via a stone chute') !

Architects necessarily need wealthy patrons who can afford to pay their fees and it is interesting that Le Corbusier built a number of structures in Ahmedabad, where wealth from cotton production, was centered after Independence.  But he was also responsible in the 1950s, for designing the layout of a new city with civic structures, including the High Court,  Parliament building and a University, in Chandigarh, in the foothills of the Himalayas - Chandigarh being the new capital of Punjab and Haryana, after the partition of India and Pakistan and the loss of the old capital city of Lahore.

Reinforced concrete played a dominant role in all his designs, whether in India or Europe, but he was sensitive to the demands of climate in India and orientation and the brise-soleil, were crucial to his designs, which also included, at Chandigarh, a water feature, to reflect an image of the monumentality of the capitol structures - a salute, perhaps, to the iconic Taj Mahal (1632 - 1653) and its lotus pond in Agra, built by an Afghan architect for the Mughal Emperor, Shah Jahan.  What a difference 300 years makes, the earlier structure built entirely of marble, emphasizing in its form and function, the wealth and power of one dynasty and the other in its embracing anthropomorphism and its unadorned use of concrete, the power of democracy.