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Chandigarh is a federal territory and capital of the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana. At the same time, it is widely renowned for being a completely designed city by the ideas of architect Le Corbusier, and it provides a number of sights that are unique to both India and the rest of the world.
Chandigarh originated from Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision of independent India’s capabilities following the independence from Britain in 1947. Chandigarh was founded and built from the 1950s, and it continues to evolve today based on the ideas from Swiss-French Le Corbusier design.
The style of Chandigarh is modernism, and Le Corbusier’s plan was to divide the city into different zones for each purpose. Thus, Sector 1 is government administration and forms the head of Chandigarh. The roads in the city are the veins of the body, while the parks are the lungs. The heart and the body are made up of the many sectors, each of which forms a whole with housing, shops, workplaces, schools and what otherwise makes a living complete.
Chandigarh is uniquely designed and still stands out to visitors. The city plan with wide boulevards and green trees and parks also gives a breath of Europe and European urban planning, which is in some ways a contrast to the other cities in colorful India.
Chandigarh has also other sights than Le Corbusier’s works. Nek Chand’s famous rock garden is a masterpiece in creativity and persistence. As a maze, the garden opens itself constantly from new and fascinating perspectives. The distance to the Himalayas are within easy reach from the city, and the atmospheric train journey from nearby Kalka to Shimla is a great experience.
The Secretariat Building is a building designed by Le Corbusier and constructed as a government administration building in 1953. The Secretariat Building’s style is typical of Le Corbusier’s time, and the building was one of the three major structures that came to make up the government area of Chandigarh, the so-called Capitol Complex. The two other constructions were the Vidhan Sabha assembly and the High Court, which can also be seen today.
The Secretariat Building continues to house the government administration. Today it is for the states of Punjab and Haryana, which at the time of the establishment of Chandigarh were one and the same state. There is no regular access to the building, but you can apply through the city’s tourist information office, which is located south of the Capitol Complex. From the top of the Secretatiat Building there is a fine view of the entire government area and beyond the green center of Chandigarh.
The Vidhan Sabha is the parliament building for the states of Punjab and Haryana. Standing as one of several architecturally dominant structures in the Chandigarh government area, the building is very distinctive from a distance with its top reminiscent of power plant cooling towers.
Architect Le Corbusier designed the Vidhan Sabha in the 1950s as part of Chandigarh’s design capital, which forms the government precinct Capitol Complex. At that time, Chandigarh was the capital of the state of Punjab and thus the building was designed to house a single legislative assembly. In 1966, Punjab was divided into present-day Punjabi-speaking Punjab and Hindi-speaking Haryana. On that occasion, Chandigarh was made a Union Territory and the Vidhan Sabha was to house separate Parliaments.
The original and centrally located parliament hall is today Punjab’s, while another meeting hall was set up as Haryana’s after the partition of the state in 1966. Punjab’s parliament is an impressive construction, where Le Corbusier has designed everything from the furniture to the decoration, which spreads out in a 360 degree panorama over the parliament itself. The decoration is elements from the body on which Le Corbusier’s urban plan for Chandigarh was designed.
The Haryana Parliament was a former meeting hall and although it was first fitted out for its current purpose in 1966, the design is by Le Coubusiers. He has thus designed both the room, the furniture and the large tapestry that adorns the room. Only a few things have changed, for example the concrete pillars that cut through the hall have been covered with wooden panels.
The surrounding space around the two parliament halls is also interesting with its modernist design in large concrete structures. There is also a colossal tapestry by Le Corbusier, where you can find some of the design elements that are repeated elsewhere in the building and in Chandigarh. Here also hangs a portrait of Le Corbusier, who was the architect behind the city.
Punjab and Haryana High Court is a common high court building for the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana and the Union Territory of Chandigarh. Before Indian independence and partition in 1947, the region’s high court was located in Lahore in present-day Pakistan, and a new court and building had to be established.
Shimla in the present state of Himachal Pradesh was chosen as the seat of the Supreme Court, which came to be called the East Punjab High Court. However, Shimla was difficult to access in winter due to snow, and therefore the body was moved to Chandigarh in 1955. In 1966, Haryana was separated from Punjab and Chandigarh became a union territory.
Thus the backdrop for the split court building designed by Le Corbusier as part of Chandigarh’s central political-administrative center called the Capitol Complex. The building is one of the most characteristic of Le Corbusier’s facilities.
The Nek Chand Rock Garden is a beautiful, creative and rich work of art that unfolds like a large sculpture garden, where during a tour you are again and again surprised by the many imaginative figures and environments that Nek Chand has created.
Nek Chand was a civil servant working in Chandigarh. In his spare time, in 1957 he secretly started building a rock garden, which today has spread over a large area of the city. From the beginning, Nek Chand only used residential and industrial waste and other discarded objects to create his work. The area where Nek Chand established his garden was in a no-build zone, so he could work quietly on his project, which only became known to the public in 1975.
After the discovery in 1975, the plan was to demolish the stone garden, but with popular sentiment on its side, it instead led to the opening of the garden as a public park in 1976. Nek Chand himself was employed full-time by the city, which also provided labor for the collection of several discarded materials and to expand the park according to Nek Chand’s ideas.
Today, you can experience a rock garden where the environments change on a circular walk. There are waterfalls, buildings and various mosaics here. Nek Chand’s many brightly colored figures are also particularly impressive.
The Open Hand Monument is one of Le Corbusier’s landmarks. This symbol of peace and reconciliation with an open hand to both give and receive is pervasive in his architecture around the world. At 26 meters in height, the monument in Chandigarh is the largest of its kind. It stands in Sector 1 and thus central to the city’s government area, the Capitol Complex, and it was also designed to turn with the wind.
Rose Garden is one of the parks, gardens and other recreational facilities located in the so-called Leisure Valley In Chandigarh. Leisure Valley meanders through Chandigarh and is shaped by the natural valley depression that lies here in connection with a stream.
Leisure Valley stretches lengthwise through the city, and here there are, among other things, various theme gardens, of which the Rose Garden is among the best known and most popular. In the Rose Garden you can experience a multitude of different roses planted in a fine park.
Sukhna Lake is a large recreational area close to the center of Chandigarh. The lake was formed in 1958 by damming the non-permanent river Sukhna Choe, whose course originates from the Shivalik Hills. Sukhna Lake was intended by Le Corbusier as a particularly quiet area, and in accordance with his master plan for the city, there is no motorized traffic on the lake, and the top of the dam is laid out as a promenade where cars are not allowed.
Today, the lakeside is a place where many go for a walk or simply relax with the good view of the water. There is also the rental of water bikes, which provides the opportunity for an extra recreational experience.
At this museum you can see an exciting presentation of the development of life from the previous civilizations around the river Indus to the present day. The museum is, in its own way, a wider natural history museum, where, in addition to archaeology, you can get to know astronomy, biology and geology, among other things. The museum building itself was built in 1973 and is located in Le Corbusier’s recreational Leisure Valley.
The Tower of Shadows was constructed as a distinctive building by Le Corbusier in the Chandigarh government area. From Le Corbusier’s side, the building was intended as a kind of textbook for architects and architecture students on how to work with shadows in terms of design. Therefore, the Tower of Shadows stands as a completed construction, even if it doesn’t look like it at first glance.
Directly opposite the Tower of Shadows, you can also see a concrete construction with a large swastika symbol on it. It is a memorial for martyrs, the Martyr’s Memorial.
This is a narrow gauge railway that runs from the town of Kalka through the mountains to Shimla along a total length of 96.54 kilometers. The railway had reached Kalka from Delhi in 1891, and in 1898 the construction of the mountain railway started, which was to connect the British summer capital Shimla with the rest of the railway network.
On 9 November 1903, Kalka-Shimla was opened for traffic, and it was inaugurated by Lord Curzon, who was the British Viceroy in India. Originally, the gauge was 610 millimeters, but already in 1905 it was adjusted to 762 millimeters, which was the standard for narrow-gauge railways. With that standard, the uniformity that the military wanted for reasons of flexible transport was achieved. In 2008, Kalka-Shimla was included on UNESCO’s list of world cultural heritage as part of the Indian mountain railways, which also include, for example, the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway.
The track starts from Kalka, which is at an altitude of 656 meters above sea level, while Shimla is at an altitude of 2,076 meters. Between the end stations there are 20 major or minor stations, of which Solan is the best known. Solan is a small version of Shimla and is named after the goddess Shoolini Devi, who is celebrated in the city with a festival every June. Of the 20 stations, there are a few that are closed down today. The stations were all built next to a major bridge construction site as places where the construction workers could stay.
Along the way, 107 tunnels were built, of which 102 remain today. The longest tunnel is found at the Barog station, which is approximately 43 kilometers from Kalka. Colonel Barog was responsible for the construction of the tunnel and, according to the story, committed suicide by shooting himself in it. It was said to be because the two tunnel tubes did not meet, after which Barog was fined. He couldn’t get over that. A local monk pointed out the way and the tunnel was completed; the incomplete tunnel is still here, however.
In addition to the many tunnels, there are 864 bridges on the route, or one for every 112 metres. A single one of them has an iron span of 18.29 metres, while the others were built as viaducts with arches à la Roman aqueducts. Bridge number 226 and bridge number 493 are among the largest and they are located between Sonwara and Dharampur and Kandaghat and Kanoh respectively. There are a total of 919 curves over and through the many bridges and tunnels.
The first locomotives on the Kalka-Shimla Railway came here from the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, but they proved not strong enough and had to be replaced after a few years. Several different locomotives were added over the years, and the last steam-drawn standard trains left the timetables in 1971. The first diesel locomotives were added in 1955. They were built by Arnold Jung Lokomotivfabrik; however, today’s traction is more recent.
Several different trains run on the line today. There are regular trains and special trains such as the Himalayan Queen and the so-called Rail Motor, which is a rail bus with a glass roof, which was originally used for upper-class visitors to Shimla.
Shimla is like no other cities in India with its location in the Himalayas and a special ambiance of the beautiful mix of British colonial times and modern Indian daily life. Shimla was established as the summer capital of the British, with the Viceroy and the entire administration moving to here when temperatures became too high in Delhi. It made Shimla one of the most important cities in British Raj.
Countless beautiful British-style buildings are everywhere in Shimla’s streets. Timber framing, tudor style and other European inspired architecture were built in the latter half of the 19th century to the first decades of the 20th century. On the main streets of The Mall and The Ridge, there are many stylish examples with Town Hall and Christ Church being some of the most famous.
Delhi is capital of India and full of sights, activities and history with the many cities within the city. British New Delhi is just one of the many capitals that have been established as Indian residential cities over time. Ancient Delhi is one of the other examples and is in itself a magnificent city, which Shah Jahan founded as Shahjahanabad during the emperor’s reign. Several other cities can be seen as forts from the many eras that passed Delhi through times.
The life and mood of Delhi is at one and the same time both positively hectic and charmingly relaxed. In Chandni Chowk’s bazaar streets, you get a glimpse of colorful India through impressions for all senses, and in contrast there are parks, boulevards and major centuries-old buildings forming quaint oases in the big city.
Phase-1, Industrial Area
Sector 17
Phase-1, Industrial Area
Sector 17, Sector 22, Sector 35
Nek Chand Rock Garden
Uttar Marg, Sector 1
Sukhna Lake
Uttar Marg, Sector 1
Museum of Evolution of Life
Jan Marg, Sector 10
Kalka Shimla Railway
Shimla, Kalka
The city of Chandigarh is a whole new city, but there is believed to have been human activity in the area around the natural lake of the place for about 8,000 years. Many rivers and a lush climate provided good conditions for settlements, which did not, however, develop into an urban settlement.
In 1947, independent India was created following the British colonial rule, which had lasted since the 19th century. The colony was divided into India and Pakistan and it had an impact on the state of Punjab.
Punjab was divided between India and Pakistan and since the traditional capital of Lahore came to be in Pakistan, a new capital was needed in the Indian part of Punjab. The result was that the Indian government reserved an area for the purpose and it was planned and built to the Chandigarh known today.
The area was found after a committee assessed several different options. It was important that climate, drinking water and logistics be appropriate for a larger city. The whole project was also important as a political symbol of the new India’s ability. Thus, the political leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, was himself quite involved in the development of the city.
The city of Chandigarh was before the founding fields, and here the new city was to be erected. The name Chandigarh comes from the goddess Chandi and garh meaning fort.
The Chandigarh Establishment Committee found an American team of architects and city planners, and they laid out a master plan for Chandigarh’s construction. However, they failed to complete the work until it was necessary to find a new one at the head of the major project.
The election fell on French-Swiss Le Corbusier, who came to characterize the city as only a few have characterized a big city before him. Chandigarh became a planned city where many conditions such as housing, jobs, pollution, traffic and shopping were all carefully thought out with a coherent idea behind each part of the city.
Le Corbusier constructed Chandigarh following a pattern of sectors, each measuring 800 × 1,200 meters. Each sector is self-sufficient in the form of homes, schools, kindergartens and so on. Shopping areas in the individual sectors were linked together to form a larger shopping area, and so green belts were also implemented more place in the city. Workplaces were also there, and in Sector 1, the Public Government Administration was placed. Other sectors, for example, became dedicated industries or other, so each sector had special functions. In this way, Le Corbusier and his team were able to limit traffic and, as planned, ensure the highest possible quality of life for the population.
In the state of Punjab, there were several population groups, each with their own language. Administratively, a new state was born when Haryana became independent from Punjab as of. November 1, 1966, and thus stood as in 1947 with a state without capital.
The solution was that Chandigarh as Punjab’s capital was made into union territory and capital of both Punjab and Haryana. In so doing, the existing structures consisted and only minor newbuildings were needed to handle two states. One example is that in the Punjab Parliament building, one of the building’s original halls was set up for a new parliament for Haryana, while many other facilities seem to be shared between the functions of both states. Above all, Chardigarh also came to be its own capital.
From the beginning, Chandigarh was planned to be built in two phases, the first of which would be able to house 150,000 people and the second 350,000. Over time, however, even more people moved to the city, which among other things saw a great growth in administrative jobs with the political division in 1966.
Since then, Chandigarh has been expanded at several tempi, starting with the northeastern center to the southwest. This has largely been done with respect to Chandigarh’s urban plan with rectangular sectors and thus with Le Corbusier’s thoughts in mind. Some older settlements have been built around the southwest, while the original areas from Chandigarh’s first decades are largely intact environments from Le Corbusier’s time.
Chandigarh, India[/caption]
Overview of Chandigarh
Chandigarh is a federal territory and capital of the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana. At the same time, it is widely renowned for being a completely designed city by the ideas of architect Le Corbusier, and it provides a number of sights that are unique to both India and the rest of the world.
Chandigarh originated from Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision of independent India’s capabilities following the independence from Britain in 1947. Chandigarh was founded and built from the 1950s, and it continues to evolve today based on the ideas from Swiss-French Le Corbusier design.
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The Open Hand Monument is one of Le Corbusier’s landmarks. This symbol of peace and reconciliation with an open hand to both give and receive is pervasive in his architecture around the world. At 26 meters in height, the monument in Chandigarh is the largest of its kind. It stands in Sector 1 and thus central to the city’s government area, the Capitol Complex, and it was also designed to turn with the wind.
Rose Garden is one of the parks, gardens and other recreational facilities located in the so-called Leisure Valley In Chandigarh. Leisure Valley meanders through Chandigarh and is shaped by the natural valley depression that lies here in connection with a stream.
Leisure Valley stretches lengthwise through the city, and here there are, among other things, various theme gardens, of which the Rose Garden is among the best known and most popular. In the Rose Garden you can experience a multitude of different roses planted in a fine park.
Sukhna Lake is a large recreational area close to the center of Chandigarh. The lake was formed in 1958 by damming the non-permanent river Sukhna Choe, whose course originates from the Shivalik Hills. Sukhna Lake was intended by Le Corbusier as a particularly quiet area, and in accordance with his master plan for the city, there is no motorized traffic on the lake, and the top of the dam is laid out as a promenade where cars are not allowed.
Today, the lakeside is a place where many go for a walk or simply relax with the good view of the water. There is also the rental of water bikes, which provides the opportunity for an extra recreational experience.
At this museum you can see an exciting presentation of the development of life from the previous civilizations around the river Indus to the present day. The museum is, in its own way, a wider natural history museum, where, in addition to archaeology, you can get to know astronomy, biology and geology, among other things. The museum building itself was built in 1973 and is located in Le Corbusier’s recreational Leisure Valley.
The Tower of Shadows was constructed as a distinctive building by Le Corbusier in the Chandigarh government area. From Le Corbusier’s side, the building was intended as a kind of textbook for architects and architecture students on how to work with shadows in terms of design. Therefore, the Tower of Shadows stands as a completed construction, even if it doesn’t look like it at first glance.
Directly opposite the Tower of Shadows, you can also see a concrete construction with a large swastika symbol on it. It is a memorial for martyrs, the Martyr’s Memorial.
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