On entering the exhibition The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947 – 1985, on view at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York through July 2, visitors first encounter a cinematic vignette from Yash Chaudhary’s documentary Chandigarh (1969). Sinewed workers labor without rest in the sweltering heat, passing headloads of cement and sand-concrete up makeshift wooden scaffolding to build what would soon become the sculptural Palace of Assembly, part of the capitol complex and administrative heart of Le Corbusier’s masterplan for Chandigarh. But the true power of these images emerges from the fact that they unwittingly expose the layered and contested meanings of modernity and, by extension, modernism in postcolonial South Asia—meanings that transcend mere architectural form and materiality.
Modernism can be broadly understood as a utopian project of architectural and urban order premised on the overlaying of a diagrammatic plan on terra nullius. Drawing on Le Corbusier’s principles,Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer’splan forBrasília—the most complete urban manifestation of the tenets of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (ClAM) in another post-colony—sought to generate new forms of social association through the reorganization of metropolitan life into distinct sectors. Modernist masterplans prioritized the movement of fast traffic along arterial roads, and the International Style in architecture accordingly took inspiration from industrial infrastructure. In Chandigarh, the sculptural curved roof of the Palace of Assembly references the Bhakra Nangal Dam in Himachal Pradesh, India, and the hyperbolic roof of the Legislative Assembly building borrows from the shape of a Croydon Power Station chimney. Both symbolized the meeting between universal ideals and industrialized modernity.
You have 0 complimentary articles remaining.
Unlimited access + premium benefits for as low as $1.99/month.