Chandigarh
— — a city drawn on paper before it was built.
Not only on a wall.
“A city that began as a drawing. Le Corbusier's grid of sectors laid out at the foot of the Shivaliks after Partition gave Punjab a new capital. Wide tree-lined streets, low concrete municipal halls, a man-made lake at the edge of the hills. Nek Chand spent eighteen years building a sculpture garden out of bottle caps and broken bangles in a forest the planners had forgotten. The city kept it.
Chandigarh, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Chandigarh is the capital of both Punjab and Haryana and a Union Territory of its own. Commissioned by Jawaharlal Nehru after the 1947 Partition and designed by Le Corbusier from 1951 onward on a grid of 56 sectors, it sits at about 321 metres in the Shivalik foothills, roughly 250 kilometres north of Delhi. The Capitol Complex — the High Court, Legislative Assembly, and Secretariat — was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2016 as part of Le Corbusier's transnational architectural work.
Le Corbusier's Capitol Complex is poured reinforced concrete left rough, what he called béton brut. The Secretariat building runs 254 metres long and eight storeys high; the Open Hand monument, 26 metres tall, turns on ball bearings in the wind. Pierre Jeanneret, Maxwell Fry, and Jane Drew worked alongside Corbusier on the residential sectors and furniture. Half a century on, the concrete has weathered into the colour of the Shivalik foothills behind it, which was always the point.
The Capitol Complex requires a permit obtained at the tourist office; visits run in guided groups for security reasons since the Punjab and Haryana Assemblies still sit inside. Nek Chand's Rock Garden, eighteen years of clandestine sculpture in a forest the planners had set aside, opens daily and covers about 16 hectares. Sukhna Lake, the artificial reservoir at the foot of the hills, is the city's morning walk. October to March is the cool dry season.