that it is perplexing that at the climax of the composition, the Assembly chamber itself, Corb falters.
One enters this chamber and one is at the bottom of a gigantic well. The walls swerve upward to a height of over 100 ft. In an attempt to kill this height, Corb has painted the walls in three horizontal bands—red, yellow and white. In an attempt to increase the amount of light reaching the floor (the natural light in the chamber is painfully inadequate), he has used yellow carpets, and further, to break up the monumental space, he has installed green and brown seats alternately in a sort of checkerboard pattern. But to what avail? Even what Lewis Mumford has called the ‘over-ingenious’ mind of Corb cannot gainsay these facts: the Assembly chamber is an unhappy place to step into, and it is a near-impossible Parliament to deliberate in.
What is the reason for this seeming failure? The fluid shape of the hyperboloid is hardly to blame. On the contrary, it is a surprisingly sensible choice and perhaps the only static space which could climax the dynamic images of the Forum areas. Instead, a likely reason for the unhappy state of affairs is the light: Corb has inserted only three openings in the circular roof, and they are supposed to let in direct sunlight only on particular days—the equinox, the solstice, etc. While this surely will make a charming story for a guide book a hundred years hence, it makes impossible conditions for those using the chamber right here and now. One thinks of Steen Eiler Rasmussen saying that sometimes Corb’s buildings are like games children play with chairs and boxes. The children set these up in a certain way, then they cry: Look at my motor car! If you say: How can it be a motor car? Does it move? They do not understand. To them it is a motor car.
This analogy becomes even more pertinent if we consider Corb’s buildings and their relevance to the Indian climate. In spite of the double roofs and brise-soleil and umbrellas, Corb’s buildings in India are particularly ill-ventilated (the exception is the Sarabhai house in Ahmedabad). Yet, an architect of Corb’s inventiveness could have made considerable progress in developing a modern vocabulary that could deal with India’s climate (as was done by the great architects of the past), if only he had wanted to actually solve the problem of climate—rather than just stop at the gesture.
IV
So Corb has his failures; yet somehow, in so glorious an architecture, they do not seem to matter. Like any major artist, his idiosyncrasies are an integral part of his ouevre. Thus, one derives as much pleasure from the minor houses of Wright, the lesser plays of Shakespeare and the earlier quartets of Beethoven as one does from any of their masterworks. It is a curious point, worth a text of its own, that in art at this level a certain amount of ambiguity and error makes for reality—reality being the antithesis of slickness. The great buildings and cities of the past were a collection of a good many decisions—some right and some wrong; this is what makes them so human. And as a friend of mine said, ‘An architect should leave twenty percent to God.’
The muses of architecture ride the centuries on a pendulum. In the West the pendulum swung all the way to functionalism and now it is swinging back. This puts it exactly hundred per cent out of phase with the state of events in India. And so for the intellectuals—leave alone the public at large—Corb’s work is an enigma which they cannot comprehend. They are genuinely baffled by the enthusiastic response of architects visiting Chandigarh, for they themselves have completely the opposite reaction. They dislike his aesthetic, his lack of climate control—and more than anything else, they dislike his concrete. Recently, a New Delhi housewife said to me, ‘Those buildings in Chandigarh! They are huge, clumsy, awful athletes.’ And an American photographer cried angrily of the Assembly, ‘It’s just a very fancy jungle gym.’ (Perhaps these are both, unwittingly, compliments.) More important, perhaps, is the fact that the Governor’s Palace was never built—the Governor having rejected the design. He says he would rather stay on in his relatively safe, Jeanneret-designed bungalow.
Yet, in spite of these antagonisms and misunderstandings, there is no doubt that Corb’s work has been of considerable benefit to India. It has stimulated a whole generation of architects. And it has given them a sense of their past, because in some inexplicable way Corb is tuned to this country. It is alleged that Edward Stone’s embassy in Delhi is ‘Indian’—if so, then it is the ersatz India of tourism and Bollywood. Corb has evoked a much deeper image of a more real India—an India of the bazaars—sprawling, cruel, raucous in colour, with a grandeur and the gravitas all its own. His aesthetic evokes our history, and Chandigarh finds echoes in Fatehpur Sikri, in Jaisalmer, in Mandu. Surely this is why a building of Corb’s sits so well on Indian soil, whereas at Harvard it seems an interloper.
Perhaps Chandigarh is the last great work of Corb. In some of his other projects since, as for instance the later Unites d’habitation, he seems merely to have produced a work of ‘applied Corb’. Is this great period, the golden age, over? There will, for sure, be those who do not agree, those eyes that will not see. In Berlin, in Tokyo, on the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, they will continue to search the sky, desperately seeking the tension wire and the lonely figure of the balancing acrobat. Where has he gone? Perhaps he is old. Perhaps his act is over. Perhaps he is on earth again, amongst us.
Varying degrees of protection
A Place in the Sun
Thomas Cubitt Lecture, at the Royal Society of Arts, London, 1983
My subject here is concerned with building in a world far removed from Britain. India—where a great many things are quite different: the climate, the energy resources, the social patterns, the cultural ethos. Hence my title: ‘A Place in the Sun’. In actual fact of course, as my friend Sherban Cantacuzino has already so obligingly pointed out to me, my talk should really have been called ‘A Place in the Shade’—since that presumably is the prime purpose of shelter in India. (And had I to deliver this talk in the heat of a Delhi summer, I might well have called it just that.) However, here we are in the middle of a London winter and I rather hope that this phrase, ‘A Place in the Sun’, does what I wish it to do: namely, in one fell swoop, lift us out of this freezing northern European weather into a faraway clime, swinging us into another state of mind, into another ambience, where warm and languid breezes blow.
If we can conjure up such a fantasy in our minds, I think we might begin to experience new attitudes to many things around us: to the clothes we wear, to the room in which we are sitting—in fact, even to our manner of sitting in it. Climate makes a fundamental difference to our need for—and perception of—built-form. In the northern regions, where the cold is severe, the architect has perforce to stay within the design parameters of a totally insulated, weather-resistant box. One is either inside this box, or outside it. The transition from one condition to the other is through a hard, clearly defined, boundary: the front door. Inside and outside exist as opposites, in a simplistic duality. (A proposition lucidly expressed in the Miesian equation: a steel-and-glass box set in a sea of open space.)
Compare this to the complex manifestations of built-form in a warm climate. Between the closed box and open-to-sky space there lies a whole continuum of zones with varying definitions, and degrees of protection. One steps out of the box to find oneself . . . in a veranda, from which one moves into a courtyard, and then under a tree, and beyond that to a terrace covered by a bamboo pergola, and then perhaps back into a room and out onto a balcony . . . and so forth. The boundary lines between these various zones are not formal and sharply demarcated, but easy and amorphous. Subtle modulations of light, in the quality of ambient air, register each transition on our senses.
I believe that this pluralism, this ambiguity, is an essential characteristic of built-form in a warm climate. This is precisely the quality that classical European architecture lost as it moved from the Greek islands, up through Rome
