161. Pierre Jeanneret and the Chandigarh Vernacular with Manu Sobti
Original Drawing by Tori Haynes
Today, we are joined by Manu Sobti who is a senior lecturer at the University of Brisbane in Australia. We talk to Sobti today about his research on Pierre Jeanneret and Aditya Prakash, what he found, and the role of these two people in the making of modern India and modern architecture
Timestamp Outline
2:36 How MS ended up with an interest in Chandigarh, his interest in how people come to places and interact with other people who are there. MS’s vinterim trip to India. Through these trips, MS thought of field work and studio ideas that would start in India and end in Milwaukee.
4:18 Why Chandigarh? MS was taken up by the fabric of the city and how it was woven together. “The fabric persisted, survived, and prospered over time” MS. Following conversation about MS’s trip around India to Ahmedabad studying the pols and Chandigarh and sharing his experiences and interactions as a Punjabi.
9:21 Chandigarh is urbanistic success is in the mind of intellectuals because they experience the city the way it should be experienced. “Chandigarh is like a stage set” MS’s background in theater. “Good theater is like life, and life is like good theater” VP and MS.
Chandigarh has a disciplinary rigor and prescriptiveness in it hat is not present in other cities.
12:30 Sector 17 and the piazza-like environment (“hard piazzas” and “soft piazza”).
“In Sector 17, the piazza is figurative in the ground of buildings that surround it, but the buildings are not solidly made like a poche around the piazza or plaza, but more like objects that somewhat softly control the activity within it” MS.
15:12 Is a hard piazza better than a soft piazza? Comparison between Venice and Chandigarh, and the scalar contrast between their piazza’s. “Sector 17 is singular and unique. It does not fit any identity because of its incompleteness” VP
17:16 The studio program from Chandigarh focuses on the neighborhoods, the fabric of the neighborhoods against the fabric of Chandigarh.
18:41 After MS found an archive in the CCA, he learned Chandigarh’s Plaza was flattened and that creating the plaza is the problem of trying to complete the construction. VP argues “as the spaces of democracy, it requires a performative engagement to produce an idea of an active citizenship rather than a passive citizenship.” You are told by the space if you are a citizen.
23:04 The frozen dreams of the capital buildings being true and untrue. The elements of the buildings that challenge the visuals (the Nutella Bar building or the Square Donut building, and the On-Edge Club Sandwich building). They are always dressed in garbs, but the inside core is conventional.
25:02 “Since Le Corbusier is ‘the big man’, let’s give him space.” MS and VP. Le Corbusier was barely on site for the project, but it was more of a transmission of thought from Le Corbusier to Pierre Jeanneret.
26:18 .The relationship between Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. There was a perception of a cordial and warm relationship between the two, and that they were happy cousins when they worked together despite the war. Their communication and trainings were very different, but somehow they worked together. Jeanneret was a neater and more elegant planner, was quieter and rarely spoke his thoughts, and didn’t speak English. Jeanneret didn’t return to his home, he made Chandigarh his home.
34:19 How did Jeanneret become successful when he didn’t speak much or the language, he’s shy, and he was the underling of Corbusier? Jeanneret slow-cooked, his work through his photography, writings, sketches, changed over time. Jeanneret and the river rock wall.
37:42 Chandigarh love Jeanneret (JT) so much because he was a simple man, he was involved with the community, and his photographs were of the space and time of life in Chandigarh before the making of the city.
38:47 Jeanneret was deeply interested in Chandigarh as a work in progress. Chandigarhi vernacular – MS, Chandigarh style – VP
42:19 Jean Mohr’s photography “was such that it was almost as if we were looking at ourselves”. Mohr came to Chandigarh to photograph the city, and made the patina look not-so perfect and that the space was taken over.
44:07 Continued conversation about the “Chandigarh vernacular”, Chandigarh furniture chairs (does the vernacular have something to do with the chairs?), and the history of auctioning the chairs for cheap. Jeanneret made furniture from found materials, which led to disappointment because it did not gain popularity. Afterwards, he stopped thinking about that furniture and started thinking about the transformation of craftsmanship.
51:48 The connection between Jeanneret and Aditya Prakash through the CCA archives. Prakash had several projects in Chandigarh, and Jeanneret would write about the ongoing projects. In Prakash’s diary entries, he wrote his aspirations were “to be able to contribute to what the new independent India would become”. Prakash also talked about uncontaminated urbanity and what it could become. Both Jeanneret and Prakash thought that the Indian family unit is a resilient unit. The Indian life is a systems idea, and you would give it a new morphology.
1:01:09 What is the sense of the modernist interior space? MS feels that it has been “grossly understudied”, and that the past has only look at buildings in a superficial manner. “The inside domestic space is where you have the effective collision between outside modernity and the traditions that survive. The collision would be in the way the spaces are used and the identity of those using them” MS
How we can make the space a part of our identity, and the give and take between the two of them creates the modernist interior.
1:06:19 MS and VP look at photographs that were taken of VP’s house not in terms of architecture, but of how the space is used. The photographer is looking through spatial gaps of where people reside. It seems almost like accidental photographs, and the style is like Jeanneret’s photography style. This added to his character as a person. He also photographed Chandigarh village life as it was happening in the house.
