I stayed in touch with my uncle, Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier all my life, but especially starting in 1961. I had worked with Pierre in Béziers, in France. You know, he had designed a really interesting centre in Béziers.¹ We spent a lot of time together talking about Chandigarh, and my ongoing interest in the development of the city over several years, and then he said to me, “But come to India with me one time, you’ll see what it is.” A few years later, I left for India and I went to see Pierre Jeanneret. Le Corbusier wasn’t there, it was just Pierre in Chandigarh at the time. I visited all of Chandigarh with Pierre, he was commenting on everything, and at the end he said, “There’s something, you see, that I’d like you to do: to take pictures of the city to make a book on Chandigarh.”

So, in 1961, I started to take a lot of photographs. Pierre took a huge number, very beautiful ones. Corbu wasn’t a photographer, he didn’t like it; he drew. Every year when I went back to India, I took new pictures and recorded its evolution. Pierre gave me all his photographs, and I have here about eight thousand photographs of the entire development of the city under construction. Buildings under construction was the interesting part, and Pierre was an excellent photographer; he took all his pictures with a high-quality Leica, which makes them valuable documents, because these photographs can’t be taken again. Then, Pierre and Corbu said to me, “So, keep on going systematically and one day we’ll make a book on the history of a city.” And the history of a city not just from the point of view of architecture or urban planning, but from all points of view: the political, geographic, ecological, and social points of view, every aspect of a city. And he said to me, “Get all the people who participated in planning the city to contribute.”

The Medical College, the universities—all these entities had leaders, lawmakers in Chandigarh behind them, who were involved not only when things were being built but beforehand, and who gave their ideas and intentions, and who were able to have a very open dialogue with Le Corbusier and Jeanneret. And that’s how they built Chandigarh. It wasn’t arbitrary at all. It was very well developed, very thought out, thoroughly discussed from day to day on the construction sites, well before it was customary to do so; now, it’s already a much more common thing to do.

At the start, the idea was to build a city that had 150,000 refugees who had to be housed with very little money and in a healthy and intelligent way. And there was the administrative part, that’s why they built the Secretariat. Contrary to popular belief, the Secretariat, the High Court, the Courthouse, and all those things weren’t like a village town hall; they serve all of India.¹ You see, people who don’t know why Chandigarh was built wonder why it’s so monumental, why it’s so grand. But it’s because India is a big country and a huge number of services had to be instituted. And it had to be very representative because it contained hundreds and thousands of people.

The buildings in the Capitol Complex in the northern part of Chandigarh are Le Corbusier and Jeanneret’s crowning achievement. They had enough freedom to execute the program according to the norms they were given. Today, the completed buildings are the Secretariat, on the left, the Palace of the Assembly in the middle [and the High Court], and [on the right] what was supposed to be the Governor’s House but it was replaced by the House of Knowledge. It was called the Museum of Knowledge, but that was changed to the House of Knowledge because people didn’t know what Le Corbusier meant by “museum.” They thought it was like all the other museums, where masterpieces are displayed. But for him it was a functional building where things had to happen, where the governor wasn’t a king but had to lead and make decisions with many other people […]: a house of analysis and immediate practical application, where lawmakers, scientists, artists, and politicians could have a tangible dialogue and then act together to find solutions to health problems, problems having to do with dams, forests, cities, rural problems, and so on.

It was a lawmaker¹ who had the idea of asking Le Corbusier for a house that would be an instrument for decision making. So, Le Corbusier told him about La Maison de l’Homme in Paris and, no doubt, what came out of that was the idea of building the House of Knowledge, not as a governor’s house but as something beyond it, a house that welcomes knowledge and where everyone together makes informed decisions. […] That means, you see, what’s interesting about the house isn’t the architecture or urban planning. Yes, of course, but that’s just part of it; it was the idea that was interesting, and that’s why, even today, the Indians still want to build the House of Knowledge. And it’s not just a building, it’s a state of mind, a vision, a way of thinking about things that’s different from the spirit in universities, where everything is compartmentalized and they can never make a truly interdisciplinary decision. They can think in several disciplines, but acting in several disciplines is a different story.

So, all his architecture is like that. It also has its shortcomings; sometimes it doesn’t function, it doesn’t play. He, himself, would say, “Ah, it’s not like that, we have to redo it, it’s not like that.” But ideas are more important than concrete—you see what I mean. And many people thought it’s the opposite. Many people said, “Corbu wants to contain everything.” That’s not true. He was very rational, very rationalistic, but for him the mind was dominant, and he was never a materialist. He was a spiritual man—and besides, in India, even the communists are spiritualists. You see, things aren’t that simple.