Join us at SCP on Wednesday 3 December for drinks and a talk by Ian Macready of Architourian. He will explore Chandigarh’s bold experiment in modernism, its achievements, its flaws, and its enduring legacy in both architecture and design.
Talk & Drinks
Wednesday 3 December
6PM
135 Curtain Road, London, EC2A 3BX
RSVP >
In August 1965, Le Corbusier died on his daily swim in the Mediterranean off the coast at Roquebrune, where he stayed at his cabin, right next to the modernist villa E1027 by Eileen Gray.
His cousin, Pierre Jeanneret packed his bags in Chandigarh to fly home to attend to his cousin’s funeral and that was the end of the involvement in the city of Chandigarh of the international group of architects who had started the project at the beginning of the 1950s.
60 years later the city has one of the highest per capita incomes in India and one of the highest Human Development Index among all Indian states and territories. In 2015, a survey by LG Electronics ranked it as the happiest city in India. In an article published by the BBC Chandigarh was identified as one of the few master-planned cities in the world to have succeeded in terms of combining monumental architecture, cultural growth, and modernisation.
Ian Macready, after 30 years in the design industry in London, which included working on projects in Chandigarh and in the foothills of the Himalayas, leads Architourian trips to visit the architecture of Chandigarh. In this talk at SCP he explores why this extraordinary experiment to bring secular modernism to a dusty plain north west of the capital Delhi has been such a success and where it falls down. He will address the other elements of its legacy such as the furniture from the project which now fetch thousands of dollars in auction houses around the world, as well as being symbols of India’s entry into the world of Modernist design.
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