While most of the residents of Chandigarh are critical at worst or ambivalent at best about their “modernist” architecture, the rest of the world has slowly been stealing its unknown treasures and making a killing at international auction houses like Christies.
Furniture designed by Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret – both were responsible for the city’s unique plan and its official buildings and many of its residences – which normally would be considered junk in Chandigarh and sold for a few hundred rupees were fetching prices of over $8,000 in some cases.
According to an article in the International Herald Tribune:
A handful of antique dealers from around the world have become regular visitors to government junkyards in Chandigarh, the experimental modernist city 250 kilometers, or 155 miles, north of New Delhi, conceived by the architect Le Corbusier in the 1950s. They buy up disused stocks of furniture that was specially created by Corbusier’s colleagues to fit out the new city.
The disappearance of large quantities of these distinctive, ultrafunctional tables and chairs – most of them designed by Jeanneret, Le Corbusier’s cousin, for the city’s government offices, courtrooms and colleges – has begun in recent months to alarm architects and some government officials in the city.
Citizens of Chandigarh should wake up to the potential goldmine they are sitting on and begin appreciating their heritage no matter how ugly it may seem to many. The city is suddenly worth millions on the art market.