Chandigarh, India 28.12.2017

I’ve never forgotten what Chris Leung said to me one day in 2006 in YRM’s office in Kings Cross in London. “be aware dan, that the architecture of Italy, of Rome will  highlight your inadequacies. The greatness of the buildings will demonstrate to you the many years you have before you come in to your own.’ I had no idea what his ramblings meant. So I hitched on my backpack, slipped into my stove pipe jeans, popped my collar, and flew for 18 quid to Rome. Veni Vidi Vici. That year, I came I, saw, got drunk in a hostel on cheap Italian beer, and chowed gelato.

Fast forward 12 years.I arrived in Chandigarh, the modern-ist, and one of a select example of pre planned cities in all of India, if not the world. Chandigarh designed by Le Corbusier the French master architect  was constructed at the time of partition between India and Pakistan in the 1950’s. The then Capital city of the Punjab, Lahore was incorporated into Pakistan. The Punjab required now a new city in India. Chandigarh was to be their new home. The city was to be a modern Indian city Barry Peppered with works by the hands of Le Corb, and his assistants, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew.
It was for this reason I was in India.

Dropping into 5^th gear, the engine roared as we began leaving the mountainous region of Dharamshala. We’d begun our descent. With the altitudic plummet, the air sloshing around my lungs began to thicken up like whisked egg yolk. Cells sucked on life giving oxygen staving off cerebral aedema and my brain activity reverted to some sense of functionality. Staring into the rear view mirror the mountains shrunk behind me and all of a sudden I thought, ‘wow, I could climb those’.

We arrived in this northern city and on first greeting, its grided-ness offered some sense of orderly-ness.  Its orthogonal structure read as a balanced balance sheet.  The one two tree lined boulevards were meticulous, turning circles were round , and the traffic lights communicated red means stop, green means go and yellow means slow.

The hotel I unpacked in, sat inside a night club. That night, the clocked tolled 10, as I lay my head peacefully upon the white firm pillow eager for renewal, the heaving bass of the downstairs night club slowly began seeping, percolating through the concrete walls of my room getting louder and louder as the dj turned the dial from off to high. As the night darkened the thick heavy grooves and grinds got louder. The clinks of vodka-filled glasses and the rockin rollin of whiskey tumblers penetrated the feathered buffer of my cushion. The Indian Banghra was banging on inside my room. With my pillow crushed tightly against my head and cotton wool jammed stuck in my ears, serving no purpose, I tried to cry. Sleep was a distance away. As 7am struck, the sun came hurtling crashing through my hotel window like a fiery space shuttle breaching earth’s atmosphere, I could finally sleep…..and then my alarm clock kicked in, doo doo do doo doodo.

Wakey wakey.

I didn’t come to India to seek self, or to dig deep into bunny chow. I didn’t come to meet the love guru or lose myself. I didn’t come to drop the suspension on my car, or install a LED halo beneath my car’s chassis. Flicking the furry dice hanging from the rear view mirror, I shouted, ‘let’s do this. I didn’t travel this far to ride shot gun’, amping myself, this pilgrimage had begun.

The only way to view Le Corb’s Government Complex, is via a two hour guided tour.
Ready Player One.

Beginning the walk through the tightly tree lined path way towards the access gates into the complex, our tour group  burst through the brush into the open piazza on which 4 iconic edifices  rest. With the sun bouncing off the concrete plaza my eyes squinted. Disorientated, stumbling as a pummelled heavy weight brawler, catching myself, righting myself, i came to stood stiff in front of a most recognisable of Le Corbusier’s buildings, the High Court. Stood before this I’ve-seen-this-before-in-countless-books building, my eyes came crashed closed sending a tsunamic ripple across the pool of tears harboured in an indent of my skull, causing a wake of salty swell to gather heavily, gathering enough weight to come hurtling down my face.
Here i was before the greatest. I cried and I cried and I cried.

The High Court and the Legislative Assembly building are set upon a vast table cloth of concrete a very far distance apart. Facing each other.  She at one end and he at the other.  When you’re an architectural god, and space isn’t a constraint, you have the opportunity to write your own Genesis. With concrete the DNA of his magnus opus, Le Corb in his round black rimmed glasses makes the heavy material that is concrete moulding melding in to what is now iconic.
The High Court is presented as a large portal, a gate way. It sits in isolation, on a pedestal.  It’s the way the architecture god wishes us all to see and experience it. It’s presented as one dimensional.
The building with its definitive trio of powerful giant coloured walls jumps forth towards you forcing necks to crane, asserting authority. Their monolith is played in contrast to the adjacent human-scaled egg crate brise soleil pocked in De Stijl red, yellow and blue softening the brutal concrete, keeping the eyes flicking, dancing, breaking the suns harsh light.

Herded border-collie-like to The Open Hand Monument, we ran up and down stairs into the sunken amphitheatre shooting the giant Hand wind vane silhouetted against the bottle-water blue sky. Shooting, sketching, running. With time short it was a feeding frenzy. Piranha’s tearing at hunks of meat.
Moonwalking along the super flat surface we arrived at The Legislative Assembly. Heavy set, a point of authority. It dwarfs us humans, only the front door, designed and painted by Le Corbusier softens its handshake. It’s giant heavy roof sitting on narrow ‘columns’. A gargantuan cone bursts from the roof, a definitive beacon on the landscape-a skylight experienced only from within the legislative chamber.

As the day set to end I took in my first breath. My emotions spilled, shattered on the floor. Humbled. 12 years after Chris’ comments, I ‘got him’.