The gallery of everything presents an installation of original sculptures and figures by Nek Chand Saini (1924 – 2015).
Born in 1924, Saini was a village-born child whose family fled to india as refugees. his lifetime project, started in secret in the 1950s, was a maze of narrow walkways and sloping gardens, filled with hand-crafted figurines.
Nek Chand, 2005
Originally titled the kingdom of gods and goddesses, his creative practice was situated somewhere in between land art, landscape architecture and the vast realm of the folkloric vernacular.
Yet even in his lifetime, Saini saw himself neither as an artist, nor as author of his environment. instead, he saw his project as a welcome contrast to Chandigarh’s sharp modernist lines, and a place where everyday people could simply go, discover and be.
In this centenary year of Nek Chand Saini’s birth, The Gallery of Everything honours his profound achievement with an installation of works from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, including original ceramic and bangle figures created by Saini and his team of workers.
An exhibition that we’ve been very much looking forward to opens this week at the V&A Museum in London. We’ve got a few of our models on display at the exhibition, and have been involved behind the scenes. There’s a large contingent from the Transnational Architecture Group making their way to various opening events this week and you can expect a series of reviews and critiques here shortly.
There’s also an article out today by Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian that discusses the exhibition concept – and some of our favourite buildings.
This is the first article in a series that considers reflections on the value of interpretation in combination with the technical practice of cataloguing, authored by CCA staff and invited scholars and introduced by Martien de Vletter. Here, we examine changing terminology. CCA cataloguer Jennifer Préfontaine considers context and the use of the term “peon” in cataloguing the Pierre Jeanneret fonds, and Michele Tenzon, Ewan Harrison, Iain Jackson, Claire Tunstall, and Rixt Woudstra sift through reworkings that were made in the development of the United Africa Company archives.
The Importance of Context
Jennifer Préfontaine weighs meaning and intent when cataloguing archival materials
During Sangeeta Bagga’s Find and Tell residency in June 2019, we—the cataloguers at the CCA—came across material using a word with which we were uncertain. A plan drawing, held in the Pierre Jeanneret fonds that Bagga was studying, labels “Peons’ Houses” as the title of a project in Chandigarh, from 1952.1 From definitions found in print and online dictionaries, we felt that “peon” could be understood as harmful in some contexts but neutral in others. A word can have different meanings, different geographies, and even different histories, in particular colonial histories. In cataloguing work, the choice of vocabulary has important implications in how researchers access and understand information. We needed to consider, is there a problem with the use of the word “peon” when identifying people?
We learned that the word “peon” has different meanings and origins depending on where and when the term is used. Among other definitions, it means a labourer or a non-specialized worker.2 In Latin America, especially in Mexico, a “peon” has additionally come to denote a labourer that has an obligation to work for their employer until their debt was paid off.3 This type of “labor practice”4 has served as the basis of what would become known as “peonage” in the period after the abolition of enslavement in the United States, where many African American freedmen and freedwomen with limited options were forced and bound into this system that maintained an involuntary servitude.56 It seems within this American context that the use of this word in cataloguing should be reassessed. However, comparatively, in South Asian countries, particularly in India and Sri Lanka, the word “peon,” brought by the Portuguese, historically meant a foot soldier or a police officer.7 These days, it refers, in an Indian context, to a messenger or attendant, especially in an office,8 designating the entry-level position in governmental and non-governmental organizations.910
Considering that the materials from the Pierre Jeanneret fonds that include the word “peon” in their descriptions are related to Chandigarh, would it be acceptable to use the term despite the negative connotation it bears in another context, especially the American one? Shall we use a different term, or keep this “contentious” word with the possible addition of a contextual note?
As the CCA is an international institution located in North America, we wonder if it is preferable to remove a word that is potentially harmful from our descriptions, even if it remains in use and seemingly appropriate in other cultural contexts. What about the research behaviour of our users? Experts on Chandigarh, particularly on Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s works, might be expecting the word “peon” and search for it in our catalogue. In order to understand the use of this term within the framework of the study of Indian architecture and society, we decided to reach out to experts of this field of research.
For Dr. Sangeeta Bagga,11 Principal at Chandigarh College of Architecture, Vikram Bhatt,12 author of Blueprint for a hack, Resorts of the Raj, and After the masters, and Dr. Vikramāditya Prakāsh,13 author of Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier and One Continuous Line, and editor of Rethinking Global Modernism, the word “peon” is an appropriate term used to designate an entry-level position at government levels in India. However, they point out that private corporations do not generally use the term anymore. Bhatt mentions that an equivalent word is “chaprasi,” and there might be other equivalent terms in other regions of India. Bagga argues that, although “office boy” is the term currently used in the private sector, “peon” still describes a position that allows people to work in dignity in a non-technical job, and people in India do not necessarily associate the word with a colonial background. It was institutionalized under the British period, but it still is in use today, without any negative connotations. Both Bhatt and Prakāsh acknowledge that while the term is still in use, it is not a word used in everyday conversation. To them, it could carry derogatory implications, depending on how it is used.
Bagga and Bhatt also mention that Chandigarh is a city that was laid down to a precise hierarchy initially with thirteen types of government housing in which the “peons” were at the lowest end.14 Bagga adds that with Jane Drew and Pierre Jeanneret’s work, it was the first time that the “peons” had planned housing accommodations.15 She underlines that the architectural drawings and other materials attest to this nomenclature; this type of housing was specifically called “peons’ houses,” as is depicted in the plan’s title. If the word is absent from the description, how would a researcher find it?
We might not be able to dissociate the use of the word from the context in which it appears. Prakāsh recommends keeping the term with respect to the Pierre Jeanneret fonds, noting that there is not a “right” interpretation of a word, certainly not based on an “original” meaning. For Bhatt, for as long as there have been contacts between the Western and Eastern worlds, languages have mutually influenced each other. With this in mind, Bhatt said that he would not be hesitant to use this word, but cataloguers should certainly recognize the different contexts in which it is used.
From these discussions, it seems apparent that the word “peon” carries different weights and meanings based on its context. All three experts recommend that we continue to use “peon” in our descriptions as part of the title field, and that we should add, if relevant, a contextual note explaining the word. As we recognize the importance of examining the changing meaning of words over time and context, especially when they are used in relation to how you refer to people directly, processes like this one, will help us set guidelines for more mindful descriptive work.
We would like to thank Sangeeta Bagga, Vikram Bhatt, and Vikramāditya Prakāsh for sharing their thoughts on this topic.
Reworking, Recaptioning, Moving Beyond
Michele Tenzon, Ewan Harrison, Iain Jackson, Claire Tunstall and Rixt Woudstra examine the Archives of the United Africa Company.
The Unilever Archives in Port Sunlight, United Kingdom, host a vast collection of items documenting the United Africa Company (UAC). A wholly owned subsidiary of Unilever, the UAC was a vast trading and manufacturing empire that itself in turn owned and managed numerous subsidiaries ranging from retail, textiles, timber, and raw material extraction mainly, but not exclusively in the British West African colonies. The scale of the UAC venture throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth century, the company’s role in colonial exploitation, as well as its economic and political manoeuvring into the post-Independence period, render its archive both a problematic and rich repository to catalogue and analyse. Archives have been the subject of a body of theoretical writing from post-colonial perspectives. This has framed the archive as both a locus of power and a technology of domination in and of itself. As the archive of the largest British business in West Africa, and one deeply implicated in the colonial patterns of resource and capital extraction in the region, the UAC archive can equally be theorised in this way. Yet, the UAC archive is also punctuated by moments of hesitancy, contestation, and challenges to the UAC’s attempted hegemony.
The UAC produced an archive as a by-product of the everyday transactions of business in the African colonies: its reports, board minutes, marketing plans, press releases, and ledgers have subsequently been ordered, catalogued, and cared for by a team of curators and archivists. But the UAC also pursued archival impulses of its own: UAC staff collected maps, African artworks and ephemera, personal correspondence and memoirs, as well as taking, collating and cataloguing thousands of photographs between 1880 and 1980. This impulse to collect and catalogue the African world around it shows the UAC’s attempts to impose an archival logic on the diverse, even unwieldy, business empire that it controlled, or attempted to control.
For architectural historians, the photographic collection is of particular interest with its bias towards recording buildings, places, people, and special events. The vast amount of visual material was produced by employees working for different subsidiary companies, each with their own objectives, vantage points, and outlooks. The contributors and content are also diverse in their geographical reach and emphasis, with records spanning vast tracts of the African continent, as well as smaller forays into the Middle East, India, and the Americas. Overall, and in coherence with the nature of a corporation which was indeed multiple, internally diverse, and geographically spread out, the collection appears as a corpus of interrelated but distinct archives each with their own provenance, consistency, detail, and granularity of data.
Considerable effort and expense were devoted to producing and presenting this photographic material. Each subsidiary produced its own documentary evidence by developing a visual record or compendium of their businesses that sat alongside the accounting records and lists. In providing sound evidence that business activity was taking place, the photographic medium was particularly useful to the parent company. Taken with a specific agenda and focus, the photographs were processed and printed before being selected to feature in specially produced albums and often accompanied by printed captions or handwritten comments. In many cases, the photographs became a surrogate for travel as many of the directors and business managers had never visited Africa and had no first-hand conception of what their business interests and assets looked like.
The images demonstrated that stores had been built, that goods were properly stocked on the shelfs and that everything was ‘as promised’. It provided reassurance for owners and shareholders, but also became a form of advertisement as is reflected by the careful organisation of these documents in the archive’s Public Relations folders. Through the photographs, distance and geographical separation seemed less important as the visual evidence which they offered ultimately delivered a sense of proximity by bringing a particular version of Africa back to the European shareholders. Photographs were meant to create a familiarity which could justify the company’s overseas presence and show that a colonial territory was ripe for development, therefore reassuring investors as well as European staff.
Because of the peculiar role of the photographic documentation for UAC’s activities, the forms of their collecting, defining, and claiming, offers a vantage point from which we can see how the company viewed, perceived, and chose to record the African social and physical environment. The image library was not fixed – it was added over time, revisited and modified. Titles were remade, notes were added, reflecting not only the transformation of the built environment, such as the extension or refurbishment of the company’s premises, or the acquisition or selling of properties, but also the shifting political situation after elections, riots, or strikes and the resulting legitimacy challenges that the company faced.
Such reworking of the archive is especially evident in those sections of the archive in which photographs have been selected and mounted onto cards, as a compiled photography library arranged first by country, then by themes. This collection was compiled to assist the production of marketing reports, company magazines, newsletters, press releases, and advertisements. The production of these publications and public relations material required the finest images and a cataloguing system allowing them to be quickly located. The notes written on the cards indicate that the UAC staff exercised a control towards what was deemed appropriate and suitable for the company’s image.
On some of these cards the captions were edited replacing terms which were perceived as outdated or inappropriate. Hence, an image described as “Native workers” was subsequently crossed out and replaced with “African workers”, before being relabelled again as “Employees”. In other instances, “African huts” was replaced by “African homes”, and “European Housing” was renamed “Management Housing” to reflect the Africanisation process of the 1950s – the recruitment and promotion of African staff within the company – which the UAC had embraced as a strategy to repair its legitimacy during the decolonisation phase. Some other images, instead, were marked as ‘to-be-withdrawn’ because the signage of shops of factories employed colonial toponyms which, after independence and for obvious reasons, had become offensive for African audiences. Whereas an image of Ibadan showing a district of low-rise houses built with adobe bricks was deemed no longer usable as it probably conveyed an unwanted sense of precariousness to the public and especially to potential investors.
We don’t know who exactly was making these decisions and how frequently the images were reassessed and relabelled. Unlike the archiving process where archivists generate titles, here they formed part of an image library. However, the fact that the photographs, rather than being re-mounted onto new cards were instead amended by striking through older labels, suggests that perhaps this context was considered valuable, if outdated. Nonetheless, letting this meta-analysis of the archive and its shifting cataloguing and labelling strategy to emerge, required challenging the traditional way in which archives are experienced.
Moving beyond the catalogue
We rarely get to see the archive in the way that one can peruse the books of a library. Instead, we experience it with no direct access to the stores and therefore no opportunity to examine the collection in person. In most cases, files are brought to the researcher after consulting a catalogue, making requests and completing slips and are examined one file at a time. While there are obvious reasons for such restrictions which aim at ensuring the integrity and safety of the material, the necessity of surveillance imposes an examination of the material in extremely compartmentalised or limited ways.
In our research project ‘The Architecture of the United Africa Company: Building Mercantile West Africa’ we have questioned this approach and attempted a different procedure that granted the research team access to the archival storage spaces. ‘Open access’ to the collection has been granted to the research team which has enabled browsing and the ability to quickly sample a box or file without even removing it from its location in the storeroom. The research team has been given extensive training in basic archive procedures, manual handling and health and safety. Retrieval slips were still completed and utilised, but the physical act of obtaining the files and accessing the store rooms was granted to the research team enabling the archive team to focus on their day to day work. The ability to compare boxes, view multiple files, or simply randomly ‘dip’ into boxes has enabled a far greater appreciation of the entire UAC collection, has accelerated our ability to ‘get through the material’, and also reduced the labour for the archives team. Viewing all the photograph albums on the shelves and to see how one album compares in size and scale to the others as well as the ability to visualise the files and their arrangement has helped us to understand the business structure in ways that would not have been possible otherwise.
This procedure, which was made possible by the prolonged collaboration between the academic team and the archive’s management team, has enabled a different working method to emerge. If the re-captioning of UAC’s photographic collection testifies how European capitalism coped with political change and pragmatically adapted itself to the shifting paradigms in the decolonisation phase, acknowledging such additional layers require ‘moving beyond’ the catalogue. The stratification of meanings and orientations which took the form of an almost curatorial approach to the cataloguing of the photographs reveals the biases and the shifting sensitivities of the actors involved in the production and management of the archive. However, such a critical interpretation of descriptive practices requires questioning the traditional interface between archivist and researchers, ultimately allowing engagement with the archive as a complete and stratified entity.
Notes
1 The term “peon” is also found on other material from the Pierre Jeanneret fonds.
2 The word has several meanings across times, languages, and cultures. Not all of them will be covered in this text. It also refers to the pawn in a chess game and to a low unit in some strategy computer games, for example.
3 William Wirt Howe, “The Peonage Cases,” Columbia Law Review 4, No. 4 (April 1904): 279.
4 Pete Daniel, “The Metamorphosis of Slavery, 1865-1900,” The Journal of American History 66, No. 1 (June 1979): 89.
5 Daniel, “The Metamorphosis of Slavery,” 1979.
6 Peonage is not exclusive to the United States. Various forms of “peonage” have existed or still exist across the world.
7 Collins English Dictionary, s.v. “peon,” accessed November 15, 2021, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1981), s.v. “peon.”
11 Dr. Sangeeta Bagga, Zoom meeting, November 19, 2021.
12 Vikram Bhatt, Zoom meeting, November 25, 2021.
13 Dr. Vikramāditya Prakāsh, Email exchanges, November 2021.
14 At the request of Jane Beverly Drew, one of the three architects with Pierre Jeanneret and Edwin Maxwell Fry responsible for the design of most of the government housing, an additional fourteenth type, known as “cheap houses,” was designed by Drew for, the previously unaccounted for, government employees who were earning the lowest-wage. Kiran Joshi, Documenting Chandigarh: The Indian Architecture of Pierre Jeanneret, Edwin Maxwell Fry, Jane Beverly Drew (Ahmedabad, India: Mapin Publishing Pvt Ltd.; Chandigarh, India: Chandigarh College of Architecture, 1999), Volume 1, 43. Sarbjit Bahga and Surinder Bahga, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret: Footprints on the Sands of Indian Architecture (New Delhi, India: Galgotia Publishing Company, 2000), 131.
15 Bagga also adds that this new housing typology for the “peons” continues to this day, with the same purpose, function, and responsibility of roles.
The Road Less Traveled is the overarching title given to a yearlong series of exhibitions programmed at the Kohler Arts Center to celebrate its 50th Birthday Anniversary – including a major exhibition on Indian artist and visionary environment creator, Nek Chand. The Arts Center has the largest collection of Nek Chand sculptures outside of the Rock Garden in Chandigarh – and they’ve put 200 sculptures on show in an extraordinary exhibition.
Curator Karen Patterson was looking for a more collaborative and creative approach to curating the shows and selected a responder for each exhibition to bring new and unique insights to the work and the final shows.
Karen asked me to send her a few ideas on how Nek Chand’s sculptures might be presented and exhibited. We met in Liverpool and discussed a range of concepts, including developing a virtual reality film of the Rock Garden [something I’m really eager to do]. We spoke about the experiential, almost cinematic nature of the Rock Garden – and how it is arranged as a series of distinct ‘outside rooms’ or events. Moving through the space and watching the sculptures being ‘revealed’, hidden, and glimpsed through this process is crucial in Nek Chand’s work.
Sculptures by Nek Chand
Sculptures by Nek Chand
It was also a decade since I completed my PhD research – and I felt it was a good time to revisit my measured drawings and catalogue of the Rock Garden. Karen agreed to exhibit my survey work and I got the catalogue reprinted at A3 size and its 250+ pages hard bound. I really enjoyed ‘re-discovering’ my old work. The survey drawings had been kept rolled up in a plastic tube for ten years, and I carefully extracted the coil of drawings, not knowing in what condition they might be in. Thankfully, they were exactly as I’d left them- tattered at the edges, full of rips, holes and dog-eared corners. I sent them off to the Arts Center, hoping they wouldn’t get lost in the post…
The catalogues of Nek Chand’s work
I arrived at the Arts Centre a few days before the official opening, having seen the CAD drawings of the proposed show, produced by the exhibition designer and co-curator Amy Chaloupka. There’s always a disconnect between an architectural drawing and what it represents – and this was no exception. The scale of the exhibition is vast – and the amount of work required to produce, install and prepare the ‘terrain’ is incredible. One really gets a sense of what it is like to be in the Rock Garden – without there being any sense of pastiche or mimicry. The sculptures are arranged according to type on a series of terraced podiums that sweep through the space, compressing the visitor into a narrow gorge-like passage where the sculptures are densely arranged facing into the walkway. This approach puts the sculptures at eye level and really enables a dialogue to emerge between the viewer and the figures. As well as the concrete sculptures there is a collection of the cloth works – an often overlooked component of Nek Chand’s work – they are again arranged as a group and tightly gathered so that they read as an ensemble of works that need to be walked around, and examined.
An early Nek Chand sculptures, c.1960
Coloured ceramics suggests early edition, but facial features are much later – is it a re-work?
Clinker hair, and brick-dust pigment gives the pinky-brown hue to the skin
In addition to Nek Chand’s sculptures there is an archway reminiscent of the Phase-3 part of the Rock Garden. Contained within this segment of the exhibition are four panoramic photographs, the catalogue and the survey drawings.
Installing the Drawings…
Panoramic photos and drawings. The catalogue sits on the perspex stand.
A lecture on Chandigarh by Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, presented to the AA School in 1983. This classic footage shows Drew, then Fry explaining their designs for Chandigarh and memories of India from the early 1950s.
There are two exhibitions on the architecture and planning of Chandigarh currently on show – one at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, and the other by Archipel at Kortrijk, Belgium.
The CCA exhibition is entitled How architects, experts, politicians, international agencies and citizens negotiate modern planning: Casablanca Chandigarh, and has been curated by Maristella Casciato and Tom Avermaete. It runs until 20th April 2014 and a publication to accompany the exhibition is to be released early 2014. I haven’t seen the CCA exhibition, but its extensive use of Pierre Jeanneret archival material promises to open up new vantage points from which we can view this intriguing city.
The Archipel exhibition has been curated following a visit to Chandigarh by 130 Belgian architects who descended onto the city, and captured not only the architecture but also something of the daily life of the place. Using a series of projectors rather than still photographs, the exhibition is constantly in flux as the large images switch from historical details through to the latest buildings, housing and street scenes. Interviews and films are also broadcast and sound recordings captured in India help to transport a little bit of Chandigarh into Europe. In addition to displaying images and sounds of Chandigarh a side exhibition investigates the relationship between the urbanism of Kortrijk and Chandigarh. An extraordinary collection of material has been gathered as a result of the visit to Chandigarh and I hope it can be collated and published.
Chandigarh continues to provoke, inspire and challenge. It was refreshing not to see the original plan of the city critiqued, nor the hero worship of Le Corbusier; rather the exhibition considered how this great experiment has been adapted, modified and inhabited, and celebrates these interventions.
‘The Influence of Fry and Drew’ Conference, Abstract 12
Claire Louise Staunton and James Price, ‘Subverting modernism through autonomous urbanism’
The film Corrections and Omissions (2013, James Price) presents two cases of anarchic urbanism in contemporary Chandigarh. The first concerns the domestic dwellings built for low and mid-rank government employees in Sector 22, designed by Jane Drew & Maxwell Fry. Residents have defied the Chandigarh edict on a small scale by adapting the buildings to their individual and family needs; by altering the room size, use and the building shape as well as permitting “homeless” low caste families to squat on their allocated land in exchange for services such as cleaning, guarding or ironing.
Secondly, the film introduces to the viewer the off-grid village of Burail. In a struggle to keep perfect order and perfect form within the 56 sectors that make up the city, the temporary slums which appear on the fringes of the grid are systematically flattened by the state. The exceptions to this are the villages that pre-date the arrival of Le Corbusier and his team, and still exist enclosed by the masterplan. Burail lies in the centre of sector 45. Its community has persistently defied all planning regulations, is built along an irregular, diagonal axis; its thoroughfares and alleyways missing from the official city map.
The paper unpacks and allies these two examples of anarchic architecture as a subaltern creation of complex spaces, which subvert the grid, and disrupt several current narratives that de-politicise or renew colonialism. Such urbanism operates within an alternative economy outside of the dominant forces of capital and development and is an inherently political act. The paper proposes that these practices expose the contradiction between the principles of indigenous architecture (Drew 1963, Drew & Fry 1964) which insisted upon learning from the vernacular thus adapting designs for the needs and habits of future Chandigarh residents and the modernist imperative to uphold the truth of materials, which guards pure design from “from whims of individuals” (Chandigarh Edict). Furthermore, this paper suggests that the increasing heritagisation of Drew & Fry’s buildings are antithetical to their ambitions for their architecture and renders the planned districts de-politicised.
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Claire Louise Staunton is the director/curator of Inheritance Projects and Flat Time House, London. Inheritance is a small group of independent curators and researchers (Laura Guy, Becky Ayre) that organises exhibitions, events, new commissions, publications and research projects. Initiated in 2007 as a vehicle to interrogate museological schemata, the narrations of history and personal and national heritage Inheritance has developed into wider territories of investigation. Inheritance works with artists, musicians and writers in collaboration with institutions to produce new knowledges and develop politically informed, critical discourses around particular topics or situations. The exchange between Inheritance curators with filmmakers, artists, writers, residents and historical artefacts offers a multiperspectival narration by a number of speakers from different places and times.
Inheritance leads a long-term investigation of the visual culture of intentionally planned urban areas (New Towns) and their migrant populations. This research project has involved a project space in Shenzhen which served to question heritage and art history in a new migrant city, an exhibition and ‘Research Lab’ unpacking the theoretical and practical applications of community at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes and more recently a performative presentation concerning the willing blindness of new developments, at Sarai, New Delhi. Other key project areas include the destabilisation of heritage through artists’ activities often redressing colonial, feminist and wider political histories in the contemporary. This has included a residency programme with the National Trust, a radio show and exhibitions in traditional museum spaces.
James Price is a documentary and experimental filmmaker who has been working with Inheritance Projectssince 2010. Price’s films have been shown on the BBC, Channel 4, and More4, in art exhibitions and international film festivals. Television projects include the mini-series What is Freedom? (Channel 4, 2009) a critical investigation of liberty and freedom in USA, and A Piece of the Moon (Channel 4 / More 4, 2008) an exploration of the capitalising of outer-space and the agents who are establishing the market. The People In Order series (Channel 4, 2006) has gone on to be shown at festivals in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Australia and the USA and was the first series of 3 Minute Wonders to be selected by Channel 4 in their annual review of work. James Price has also exhibited video installations and photography in the UK. His 2006 installation, Conversation, an exploration of human interaction and judgment, has shown in the UK, Canada, the USA, and Iran. This work is being distributed as an educational aid in the UK, Australia and North America. In 2012 he produced The Body Adorned a semi-permanent installation in the Anthropology Department at the Horniman Museum, London.
‘The Influence of Fry and Drew’ Conference, Abstract 9
Antony Moulis, ‘Designing with landform and climate: Fry and Drew’s contribution to the Chandigarh master plan’
In the book Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone (1956) Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew strongly criticise both ‘Garden City’ and ‘grid-iron’ layouts as ‘unrealistic’ to housing and town planning in the tropical context. Key to their own planning precepts is a practical concern for the relationship of landform and climate – the prevention of erosion, the securing of road drainage and respect for the natural contours – leading to housing layouts subtly adjusted to the prevailing conditions. For Fry and Drew such an approach emerged productively from their work begun in the British government’s West African colonies in 1944 and continued at Chandigarh, India, between 1951 and 1954. Their specific critique of both Garden City and grid-iron forms – the prevailing planning approaches in mid-20th century modernism – could be viewed as a direct legacy of their experiences in Chandigarh, where the partners found themselves working within the constraints of the city’s famous master plan, drawn by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, which was broadly understood as a rational gridded revision of the original Garden City plan devised by the US planner Albert Mayer. Yet subtle adjustments of the city’s gridded layout to account for features of the land reveal the greater agency of Fry and Drew in the master plan’s formation and speak of their knowledge and experience of planning in the tropics already gained from their West African work up to 1950.
Based on research of the architects’ archives held by the RIBA and the V&A Museum, this paper gathers evidence of Fry and Drew’s contribution to the Chandigarh master plan, drawing upon testimony of both partners of events surrounding the master plan’s making in early 1951. By seeing Chandigarh’s overall layout in context with the architects’ own strategies for housing and town planning in the tropics published between 1947 and 1956 the paper will argue the key role of Fry and Drew in substantiating the Chandigarh master plan as more than simply an abstract conceptualisation of city form.
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Antony Moulis is Associate Professor and Director of Research in the School of Architecture at the University of Queensland, Australia. His research on practices of design in mid-twentieth century modern architecture includes archival research at the Fondation Le Corbusier, the Alvar Aalto Academy, and the Canadian Architectural Archives. His architectural writing for professional and academic journals appears in ARQ, AA Files, Architectural Theory Review, Architecture Australia, Monument, Architectural Review Australia, and The Journal of Architecture. He is currently a Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council Discovery project on eminent Australian architect John Andrews, known for his work in North America in the 1960s and ‘70s, including Gund Hall at Harvard. Moulis co-convened the 2011 Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia & New Zealand, and was awarded Best Paper at the Society’s 2010 Conference for his research of the collaborative links between Jorn Utzon and Le Corbusier.
In about 1991, Jane Drew lectured to students at the Hull School of Architecture and advised them to ‘aim for the moon’. Drew gave a good overview of her life and career, showing images of her work at Chandigarh, Ibadan University and in Iran. During this period she was writing her biography, although never published, and similar ideas and themes are present in the lecture here: most notably, her willingness to work hard and make mistakes, and her (perceived) luck in becoming an architect. Of being a woman architect, she said: ‘I think its a bit like making a monkey draw. If a monkey can draw it’s wonderful. If a woman can do something well it’s … I think being a woman is really a help or has been, rather than otherwise.’
A transcript of the interview has been kindly sent in by Malcolm Dickson and can be downloaded here: Drew Lecture at Hull, c1991
Transnational Architecture Group 
