BRICK BY BRICK

CHANDIGARH: NOTES FROM THE GRID

AARAV D’SOUZA

April 11, 2025

In a city built on geometry and dreams, what remains when the dream fades? Chandigarh was India’s modernist gamble—a new state capital in a now-divided nation. Le Corbusier drew the grid; history filled in the rest. Now we walk the quiet streets where utopia once lived.

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There are things we tell ourselves about cities. We tell ourselves that if the streets are aligned, if the water flows, if the sun falls just so across a square, then the people will come, and prosper. We tell ourselves that concrete can bear the weight of a dream.

This is the story they told about Chandigarh, India’s first planned city after independence. Conceived in the 1950s to replace Lahore—lost to Pakistan after Partition—it was designed by Le Corbusier, assisted by Pierre Jeanneret and a team of Indian and international planners. Built at the foot of the Shivalik Hills, this Punjabi city was to be rational, modern, and unburdened by the past. A grid against the chaos. It was, in Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s words, “an expression of the nation’s faith in the future.”

And yet.

Incredible Chandigarh

I arrived in late February. The taxi driver didn’t know the street names, because no one calls them by name. The city is divided into numbered sectors, a system lifted from a logic that always seems neater on paper. Sector 17. Sector 22. Sector 9. It sounds less like a city and more like a filing cabinet. People live in these sectors. They marry. They pray. They haggle over onions. But the dream was never just about people. It was about a plan.

Chandigarh was meant to be a city without history—that was part of the appeal. After Partition tore India in half, Nehru wanted a new capital for Punjab. Something modern. Rational. Unscarred.

Palace of the Assembly (exterior)

Palace of the Assembly (interior)

They brought in Le Corbusier, the Swiss French architect with thick glasses and a hunger for a tabula rasa. He gave them order: sun, space, greenery. He gave them modular concrete brise-soleils, giant geometric symbols of the state. He gave them the Capitol Complex, where the High Court looks like a fortress and the Assembly like a ship stranded inland. These were buildings that didn’t ask to be understood. They announced themselves.

And yet.

Walking the Capitol Complex, I felt not awe but silence. The kind of silence that accumulates in places where ideology once lived. The reflecting pool is dry. The great tapestries are fraying. Guards doze beneath corrugated roofs. The place is a monument to ambition, and to the slow erosion of ambition by time, weather, and reality.

This is the first lesson of Chandigarh: Utopias don’t age well.

Bird’s-eye view of India’s Emerald City

It would be easy to dismiss this city. To say the plan didn’t work. That it was arrogant, foreign, naive. That it is too spread out, that it never developed a real street life, that its zoning principles carved up not just land but also human spontaneity. And all of this is true.

But it is also true that Chandigarh is still standing. That it remains one of the only major cities in India with functioning infrastructure, with trees that arch over roads like ribs, with roundabouts that still whisper of Le Corbusier’s desire for “calm circulation.” There is something about the place that resists collapse, even as it resists seductiveness.

Open to give, open to receive

What makes Chandigarh relevant now is not that it succeeded, but that it tried—at a scale and with a clarity of purpose that seem almost unthinkable today.

We live in a time of pop-up parks and tactical urbanism. We fetishize “bottom-up design,” “smart cities,” “organic growth.” But these are often evasions. We are afraid to dream big because big dreams have been used to justify displacement, colonialism, control. We know that. And yet we still need a way to think about public space—about collective form, about what happens when architecture tries to say something bigger than profit.

Chandigarh still speaks to that impulse, even if its voice is cracked.

Punjab University

In the afternoons, I found myself at the Chandigarh Coffee House, a relic in Sector 17 with ceiling fans, laminated menus, and waiters who wear red jackets and don’t bother with small talk. Bureaucrats come here. Retired engineers. Students who like the retro vibe. It is a deeply uncool place, which is why it’s perfect. From here, you can watch the city move—not quickly, not dramatically, but steadily. There is an odd, persistent calm. It is the calm of a city designed to subdue chaos, and to keep history at bay. Even if history always leaks back in.

Le Corbusier believed in universal forms. In proportional harmonies that would transcend culture. His Modulor system was based on a six-foot European man, a figure meant to humanize architecture—but also, inevitably, to standardize it. Chandigarh was built on this system. But its inhabitants, then and now, are not six-foot Europeans. They are not abstractions. They are not principles. They are people who hang laundry from balconies, who paint their walls lime green, who set up roadside tea stalls in defiance of zoning codes. They bend the city to their needs. This, too, is a kind of architecture.

The second lesson of Chandigarh is that all design becomes vernacular in the end.

Downtown

That’s what I noticed most—how the people who live here have slowly de-Corbusier’d the place. Trees have grown too large for their plots. Sectors have blurred into one another. The Secretariat is now partially covered in solar panels. The monuments still stand, but they’re no longer treated as sacred. They’re backdrops now. Quiet giants in a city that no longer salutes them but doesn’t quite reject them, either.

And maybe that’s the most honest relationship we can have with modernism.

There’s a temptation now to discard all grand plans. To say that the twentieth century’s experiments were mistakes. But Chandigarh complicates that narrative. It is not a failure. It is not a success. It is something stranger—a dream adapted into something livable. That may be the best any dream can hope for.

Government Complex

Preservationists are in a bind. Some parts of Chandigarh are protected by UNESCO. Others are crumbling. But the question isn’t just what to save—it’s why. Do we preserve the dream, or the way it was broken? Do we protect the grid, or the deviations? These are not just technical questions. They are moral ones.

What does it mean to inherit a city built in someone else’s image? What parts of that image do we redraw, and what parts do we keep, because even mistakes carry truth?

In a moment when the climate is collapsing, when democracy is under strain, when nostalgia is weaponized and progress is suspect, Chandigarh asks whether there is still room for civic architecture that isn’t ashamed to speak with conviction.

Mural by Le Corbusier (Palace of the Assembly)

We no longer believe in blank slates. But we still have to draw the lines somewhere.

That’s the last thing I’ll say about Chandigarh. It’s not a model. It’s not a warning. It’s a city. And like all cities, it is full of ghosts—of those who imagined it, those who resisted it, those who lived in it long enough to forget the plan entirely.

The grid is still there. The light still falls just so across the plaza. And sometimes, in the right sector, at the right hour, if you pause long enough, you can almost believe the city is floating.

Aarav D’Souza (b. 1991, Panaji, India) is a writer, architectural historian, and lecturer at the University of Leeds, where he teaches courses with titles like Ruins of Progress to undergraduates who mostly want to talk about AI. Educated at CEPT University in Ahmedabad and later at Bartlett in London (where he completed a PhD on postcolonial capital cities no one quite knows what to do with), D’Souza specializes in the kinds of buildings that were once meant to change the world but now mostly shelter pigeons, bureaucrats, and the occasional design tourist.

Cover image: Palace of Justice