Redrawing Chandigarh

The realization that Chandigarh was the peak of a new sensibility in architecture and city planning that has seen modernity adapt itself to completely different climatic contexts and cultural identities from the ones that existed in Europe and the West makes it possible to regard it as the first step toward an appreciation of the vast extent of the territories in which tropical modernity would be able to produce radical changes. Chandigarh can be seen as the first widely recognized case of the export of the modern tropical paradigm, replete with architectural and aesthetic models that were shared with the elite of the time. Content of the book A protocol drawn up long ago in 1945 by Otto Koenigsberger, adopted in nearly one hundred instances in India and in more than half the world, provides the framework and rules for the planning of the prototypes of planned cities, and tells us that the so-called “Participative Architecture” aimed at intercultural inclusion, originated in the post-colonial territories between India and Africa. The catalogue, the fruition of a 5-year long Italian-Indian research, illustrates the consequences of democratic choice in independent India, its factual existence and its globalized outcomes, present even today. Presented in the installation, are four examples of Democratic New Towns – Jamshedpur, Bhubaneswar, Faridabad and Chandigarh- outcomes of the interface between the experiences of Frey, Drew and Le Corbusier and the ideas of their Indian counterparts, Varma, Doshi, Correa, Rewal. The cities are analytically described and documented through photographs of their present condition, preserved as the modern protected areas in Europe. Texts by: Maddalena d’Alfonso, Paolo Brescia, Anna Nurra, Elisa Fiscon, Jacopo Galli, Ingrid Paoletti Conversations with: Balkrishna V. Doshi, A.G. Krishna Menon, Rahul Mehrotra Milan, Museo Diocesano, April – September 2016 Official event of XXI International Exposition of Triennale di Milano, Design After Design