The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier (Chandigarh)

Look for these

• 01

  The parasol over the High Court

  The building has a second roof floating above it — a great concrete vault carried clear of the offices below, so the sun never touches the working rooms and the monsoon runs straight off. Underneath it, three piers painted green, yellow and red hold up the entrance. Stand back far enough to see the whole thing reflected in the pool. It is the most photographed view in Chandigarh for good reason.

• 02

  The Assembly's cooling tower

  The great curved drum rising out of the Assembly roof is the debating chamber, and its shape came from the cooling towers of a power station. Le Corbusier lifted an industrial form nobody considered architecture and made it the crown of a parliament. The upturned concrete scoop over the entrance porch does the same trick in reverse — it looks like a wing, and it is a rain shield.

• 03

  The enamelled door

  The main gate of the Assembly is a huge steel door covered in bright enamel panels that Le Corbusier painted himself, filled with his private symbols: the path of the sun, the spiral, and the Modulor — his proportion system based on the measurements of a human body. It is the one place on the site where the man drops the concrete mask and shows you his sketchbook.

• 04

  The Open Hand, turning

  Twenty-six metres of sheet metal shaped like a hand, mounted on a bearing so that the wind swings it. Le Corbusier's note for it read: open to give, open to receive. He never got it built — it was finally erected in 1985, twenty years after his death — and it is now the official emblem of Chandigarh. It sits in a sunken court called the Trench of Consideration, which was meant to be a place for citizens to argue in.

• 05

  The Tower of Shadows

  An open concrete frame with no glass in it anywhere, angled so precisely that direct sun cannot get inside at any hour of any day. It is a working experiment rather than a building, and it explains everything else on the plaza: every deep hood, brise-soleil and overhang here is doing the same job of keeping a Punjabi summer off the walls.

• 06

  The scale of the plaza

  The space between the buildings is enormous and deliberately so — Le Corbusier composed it against the Shivalik hills, and each building is placed to sit at a certain height against that ridge. Walk it rather than drive between the buildings. The distances feel punishing at noon and completely right at five in the evening, which tells you when he meant you to come.