Whispered Stories: Le Corbusier in Chandigarh

In 1950, the Indian government commissioned Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier to design the city of Chandigarh. The project is often seen as marking a new era of modern architecture in South Asia. Records housed in the Frances Loeb Library at the GSD reveal the challenges of the monumental project as well as its influence and legacy. This semester, Graduate School of Design students Rishita Sen (MArch II 2025) and Neha Harish (MArch II 2025) organized a conversation on India’s rich history in modernist architecture, inspired by the Le Corbusier collection in the Frances Loeb Library Archives and Le Corbusier’s design of Chandigharh.

In collaboration with Rahul Mehrotra, John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization, and Ines Zalduendo , Special Collections Curator, the group met one evening to view historic objects and share stories that Mehrotra gathered as a result of his proximity to Le Corbusier’s community in India. The gathering is part of a series of “Archives Parties” that Zalduendo offers to the GSD community in collaboration with professors, student groups, and others interested in focusing on a particular theme or subject within the library’s collections.

“We represent a group of South Asian nations at the GSD,” said Sen, “and, because Neha and I are both so familiar with how modernism came to India, we wanted to pay homage to what we know, while setting the stage for future conversations focused on a range of South Asian nations and themes.”

The story of modernism in India starts with its independence from Britain in 1947, when the nation embraced the opportunity to define its identity through architecture and design. While “revivalists” attempted to reinvigorate older forms of Indian architecture to signify this new moment, Jawaharlal Nehru, the nation’s first prime minister, “embraced modernism as the appropriate vehicle for representing India’s future agenda,” writes Mehrotra in Architecture in India Since 1990. Modernism was free of associations with the British Empire and symbolized the pluralistic nation’s desire to be “progressive” and globally connected. Earlier in the century, Art Deco had become popular, introducing the use of reinforced concrete by the Maharajas, explained Mehrotra, and aligning Art Deco with opulence. At the same time, starting in about 1915, Gandhi constructed ashrams with a an aesthetic that grew out of frugality, creating an association between modernism and Gandhi’s ethics of  “minimalism,” and the ethos of today’s environmentalism and sustainability.

In 1950, Nehru commissioned Le Corbusier to design Chandigarh, setting in motion the country’s nascent development program and national identity under the era’s premise that, writes Mehrotra, “architects could shape the form not only of the physical environment but of social life.” A culture could be determined by its design.

At the Frances Loeb Library Archives, Harish, Sen, Mehrotra, and Zalduendo gathered with staff, faculty, and students to discuss a range of objects from the university archives as well as Mehrotra’s personal collection. Mehrotra noted how refreshing it was to be able to speak conversationally about these histories, within the context of the typically more formal archives at an institution.

“We were interested in engaging with oral histories,” said Harish, “which have been reiterated over the years.”

“Having grown up in Bombay,” said Mehrotra, “and having known architects who worked in that time, I heard many stories about who went to receive Corbusier at the airport when he travelled from Paris to make his connections to Delhi, or for his projects in Ahmedabad, etc.. Also how in his stays in Mumbai, Doshi and Correa walked with him on Juhu Beach, discussing architecture.” Some of the “whispered accounts” that circulated in the community between Le Corbusier and other architects and contractors in India from the 1950s to 1970s were evident in letters Mehrotra shared. In one, from Le Corbusier to the Indian government, the architect stridently requests an overdue payment. “Everyone believes that Le Corbu received incredible patronage in India,” said Mehrotra, “but, in fact, it was an uphill task, and, as was evident in the letter I shared, the man was going to go bankrupt.”

In other correspondence, notes Harish, “we saw the concept of jugaad,” a Hindi word meaning “make do with what you have,” as Le Corbusier had to “mend and mold the concrete every step of the way. Once he’d had this experience with the concrete looking so handcrafted in India, he could never replicate it anywhere else.” Le Corbusier used concrete for the construction of Harvard’s Carpenter Center , the only building he designed in North America , completed in 1963.

Mehrotra’s revised and updated Bombay Deco (Pictor Publishing), written with the late Sharada Dwivedi, was released in December 2024, and speaks to the history of Art Deco in India. In 2018, Mumbai’s collection of Art Deco buildings, the second largest in the world, was named a UNESCO World Heritage site. Le Corbusier’s use of concrete in Chandigarh rose out of that Art Deco tradition in Mumbai.

“Art Deco resulted in the creation of a whole industry that could produce reinforced concrete,” Mehrotra explained. “So, for Le Corbusier, the technology developed over 30 years. If Art Deco hadn’t happened [in Mumbai], and we weren’t using reinforced concrete, he couldn’t have built Chandigarh—because that’s the material he knew.”

The group also discussed Le Corbusier’s relationship with other key figures, including his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, who collaborated with him on building Chandigarh. Jeanneret and Le Corbusier had practiced together in France for over a decade, until 1937, and then, alongside the couple Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, reunited to design and construct Chandigarh.

Finally, the group celebrated the role that British urban planner Jacqueline Tyrwhitt played in developing architectural projects and discourse in South Asia in the 1940s and ’50s. Trywhitt worked with urban planner Patrick Geddes, editing Patrick Geddes in India, published in 1947, and was a United Nations technical assistance advisor to India and member of the 6^th Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in 1947. She served as a professor at the GSD from 1955 to 1969, and, as Dean Sarah Whiting explained, “helped establish and fortify the urban design program in its founding years.” An urban design lectureship named in her honor continues to support visiting scholars at the GSD today.

“Whose Space Is It?” A conversation with Frida Escobedo from Harvard Design Magazine

The following interview, originally published in Harvard Design Magazine: Issue 49, features a conversation with Mexico City-based designer Frida Escobedo. A 2012 graduate of the GSD’s Master in Design Studies program, Escobedo was recently selected to design the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Modern and contemporary art wing. An upcoming monographic book featuring the work of Escobedo titled Split Subject will be published by Harvard Design Press.

“Whose Space Is It?”

Frida Escobedo & Sala Elise Patterson

Frida Escobedo’s approach to designing for public spaces begins with a consideration of the most vulnerable people in them. Do they feel safe, accounted for, supported? It is an extrapolation of the power dynamics she confronts when designing for the microcosm of the single-family home. Escobedo has developed an eye for the way traditional architecture conceals and oppresses domestic workers in her native Mexico. She responds with projects that encourage an acknowledgment of this largely female class of workers, their needs, and their productive labor.

Her public work, most often temporary installations, scales this concept as “highly activated incubators.” The projects not only reveal and celebrate the individual, but at times they work to further a body politic. Her prizewinning pavilion at the Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City was an experiment in programming a space whose purpose was meant to be deconstructed and transformed by visitors through a shared experience. It is quintessential Escobedo: using the built environment to stimulate an improvised dance between rigid material, human agency, and collective consciousness.

Sala Elise Patterson

Why did you decide to interrogate [or address] social and political issues with your work?

Frida Escobedo

It wasn’t really a decision but rather realizing that if you look at architecture through a lens of inquiry, that’s what naturally comes out. There is not a built environment that doesn’t make a comment on social, economic, and political forces, whether intended or not. Because it’s materializing human life, it will necessarily be a commentary on human life.

Sala

When anticipating the different audiences for a public commission, do you find that there are competing needs, with one public taking precedence over the others?

Frida

We’re always trying to start with a gender perspective because it reveals how public spaces are created for the group in power—usually men—and therefore align to that way of thinking and behaving. And there is a spectrum of experience that goes from being uncomfortable in a space to the most important condition, which is being at risk or endangered.

When you’re uncomfortable in a space, the message is, “You don’t belong,” because that space was not made for you. This creates a condition of displacement, of being inadequate, both in the public and private spheres And that only reinforces the other intangible experiences that are heightened by not belonging in a space. It’s important to understand how small changes affect both the risk and the sense of belonging and to consider all needs rather than just the patriarchal, binary ones.

Sala

Your book, Domestic Orbits, looks at how, through design, certain groups are excluded and rendered invisible in spaces of domestic labor. Does the built environment similarly conceal certain genders, races, or classes?

Frida

Yes. I think that’s why we shifted the scale for Domestic Orbits. We started by analyzing the main residential unit, in this case, Luis Barragán’s home studio, a house embedded within a house. But then we moved to a multifamily building and then slowly into larger compounds. You start seeing that the dynamics that happen within the private house are replicated in collective housing, and then in the public sphere.

Sala

Can you provide an example?

Frida

There was a project for making a public transportation line on Paseo de la Reforma, one of the main avenues in Mexico City that goes from downtown all the way to Lomas de Chapultepec, a very wealthy neighborhood. The initiative was stopped right where Lomas started because residents thought public transportation would damage the image of their neighborhood. Clearly the most vulnerable person in this case would be an Indigenous woman domestic worker who has to take public transportation either very early in the morning or late at night. She becomes vulnerable. She is dependent on having a specific time frame when she needs to move around the city. So the city does not belong to her.

Sala

You talk about how domestic architecture can create spatial inefficiencies when it’s trying to hide unpalatable realities like the labor that keeps a house tidy (e.g., large pantries for concealing appliances). Are there ways to make public spaces more efficient, even if that means exposing tensions we don’t want to see?

Frida

Absolutely. Mexico City is a great example, because everything happens in the public space—life and death. An example is the food cart or food truck. If you analyze the time people spend just setting up and breaking down a food truck, it’s half the workday. This idea of them being informal is problematic because by casting them as such we avoid recognizing their needs; but they are actually highly organized and quite fixed, culturally, and physically. In Guadalajara, a brilliant architect renovated a small plaza and included water taps every few feet and a proper grease trap on the drainage for the street, like the ones in kitchens. It was basic, but it made it much easier to set up a stall and take it down. He was facilitating the use of time and also protecting the infrastructure, if you think about the grease that goes into the sewage system.

Sala

To what extent have architecture and design enabled or constrained how we define public space?

Frida

It’s interesting to see what’s happening in the public sphere during the pandemic, because it always seems to be controlled by some form of power or domination. For example, during the Ides of March protests last year [which called for the end of gender-based violence in Mexico], some monuments were heavily graffitied. The government’s strategy was to put a fence around these public monuments. It signifies that the streets don’t belong to you. These monuments do not represent you because you are not a citizen, or at least not in the same way that other groups are. Then this year, the government put a fence around the National Palace, a government building. But this time it was “re-signified” through a very intelligent and powerful strategy: a collective of women organized to have the names of the victims of violence and femicide written on the fence. So these thresholds became a board to endorse or communicate something else. And the people supported it, leaving flowers and candles. It became a huge altar, which the government didn’t expect.

Sala

How can we create public spaces where people can actually reveal these kinds of discomforts and resolve them without it turning to violence?

Frida

The more we’re able to negotiate those differences in public, the less of a snowball effect we will have. But we don’t have any options right now. Either it’s a public space that’s controlled by the government, or spaces that are controlled privately. There’s no way of having a space that is not politicized or controlled. I wonder, how can we open them up?   Read more selected essays and subscribe to Harvard Design Magazine by visiting its website harvarddesignmagazine.org.

Faculty-led CO-G Wins WS Development’s Inaugural Design Competition for Public Art

CO-G , the design studio led by Design Critic in Architecture Elle Gerdeman, is a winner of WS Development ’s new biennial juried competition, Design Seaport . Emerging practices were invited to submit designs for public art that “engages, inspires, and unites” the fast-growing Boston neighborhood.

The puffy, cobalt-blue installation—incorporating recycled denim and foam—plays on Gerdeman’s early career in fashion. An interest in materiality, tectonic assemblies, maintenance, construction, and weathering finds its way into all of her work.

Read more about the project on the Interior Design website.

If it’s for us, but not with us, it’s against us: Hicham Khalidi on the challenges of curating in public spaces

Sprawling across entire cities, the biennial has become a prominent means for architects, designers, and artists to engage with pressing contemporary issues. But exhibitions on this scale pose particular curatorial problems. How can a curator translate idiosyncratic projects and the unique perspectives of the design disciplines into works that will resonate with the public?

For curator Hicham Khalidi, who delivered a lecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design this fall, part of the answer lies in understanding the public realm as a multilayered system. Just as urban spaces nest and overlap, the occupations of urban life—from homemaker to craftsperson to civil servant—form complex hierarchies. Khalidi believes that the task of a biennial’s curator is to translate projects vertically within this system. A single project can engage different people in very different ways, and large distributed exhibitions can bring projects to the people with whom they will resonate most strongly.

As the director of the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Khalidi fosters the work of designers, architects, and fine artists of all stripes. But he is equally committed to the issues that impact the world at large. He is curating a biennial in Chandigarh that will be about water; another in Marrakech featured site-specific works that were about the city itself. For Khalidi, it is not a contradiction to operate in the public realm while simultaneously being committed to the personal visions of artists and designers.

What are the challenges of curating large exhibitions in public spaces and spread across cities?

Design and public space do not always match. (Architecture is the exception in which they do match.) The thing I want to tap into is public space, and to do this, novelty is important—the idea of being a novice and approaching things with a certain naiveté. I have always used this to my benefit. I am constantly in new spaces and new cities. So what is my process? Choosing artists, for example, is always a work in progress in these large biennials. I start with a hunch or an intuition, and I talk with artists about it. Then at some point I let go and let the artists create their own spaces. They create spaces that can nourish communication and create knowledge and activities to bring people together. In other words, artists have their own processes, and what I do as a curator is to lay down the groundwork for them.

Approaching complex issues with openness is a way of putting yourself in the place of the audience.

And not only the audience. Public space is not only a sort of free space for citizens to inhabit; it also has to do with rules, laws, city development, and ideas and hunches and aspirations. When I’m curating a large exhibition, I talk to a plethora of people that are involved with a shared public space, from residents to the mayor to government ministers. It is a vertical system. Depending on the country this is more or less difficult. In Morocco or India, for example, it is much harder than in the Netherlands, because there are more layers, and there is less communication across them. In Morocco, you have the city run by the mayor, then neighborhoods that are controlled by certain people, then also streets that are controlled by other people. So it is a matter of going through all these people and explaining the project to them. This can require yet another set of people to help with these translations—they are sometimes called fixers—who can bridge these gaps. In order to get the exhibition I want, I have to understand how these systems work and engage constantly in translations up and down the chain.

Public space is not only a sort of free space for citizens to inhabit; it also has to do with rules, laws, city development, and ideas and hunches and aspirations.

Hicham Khalidi on understanding the complex systems that dictate how a public space is used and perceived

What is the relationship of your work to disciplinarity: How do you integrate artistic disciples, craft, and other specialized knowledge?

At the Jan van Eyck Academie, we are very multidisciplinary, but when we begin to work, we don’t care about disciplines, we care about subjects. We understand that there are different viewpoints, different ways of understanding the world. A fashion designer uses fashion to understand the world—that’s it. I have worked in a wide range of disciplines, from cooking to theater, and I incorporate those interests into exhibitions. In my approach to public spaces and cities, I am not thinking about disciplines at all. In India, I am thinking about water. They have a water problem. To approach this I need as many disciplines as possible. I need science, engineering. So for a biennial, I also invite artists that have a practice that I think would work well in this situation.

What draws you to the process of curating?

Curating, for me, is just a way of understanding the world—and every time I approach a project, I approach it anew. I see curatorship as a very singular inquiry into what interests me as a person. Of course, a curator needs to make it public, but making something public does not mean scraping away this personal interest. A lot of what we do is to find each other through personal interests. I do follow trajectories, just as an architect will revisit themes in a series of projects, but I also approach artistic work as a very singular, personal process—even when I curate very publicly, with many people.