Corbu was all set to go after only one week on the site. He started building with nothing more than half a dozen concrete mixers and one crane. Says British Architect Maxwell Fry, who helped with the job: "We had 20,000 women and children, oxen and donkeys by the thousand. We got the big concrete structures up with a mess of cockeyed scaffolding. We really built it like the Pyramids."
A Ragbag. There are critics who argue that the buildings are so far apart that they lose all relationship to each other. Corbu replies that he designed it with the measure of man in mind. One unit of measurement was the distance that a man can walk in an hour. For the interiors, he used his mystifying modular--a personal improvisation on the ancient Greek Golden Section based on the harmonies of the human body. This is one Corbuism that even his admirers find difficult. Says Editor Banham of the British Architectural Review: "It is a ragbag of ideas of the 1890s, represented with such seductive force that for a decade they have seemed as modern as tomorrow's Sputnik."
In time, the buildings will be brought into closer relationship, when the pools, the clumps of trees, the sculptured hills between them are finished. But the buildings will never be Indian, for they were not intended to be. "No idea belonging to folklore or to the history of art," said Corbu, "can 'be taken into consideration in such an enterprise." The city is universal, ancient, and wholly modern; its major buildings are orchestrations of pillars and brises soleil, of soaring archways and intertwining ramps, of random openings and tense facades that dance like notes on a musical score. They are princely and crude at the same time-both beautiful and brutal.
From a distance they are magnificent, but on closer inspection, some observers find them disturbing. Says Michigan's Architect Minuro Yamasaki of the High Court Building: "In India, I thought, everything is elegant and refined; but here was something crude. I thought this building should have elegance and be proud, too. But it is a fist instead of a hand." Architect Paul Rudolph of the Yale School of Art and Architecture disagrees. "As time goes on," says he, "everyone will understand the importance of Chandigarh; people will go there as they now go to the Piazza San Marco."
Timeless Image. People already go by the thousands to another Corbu masterpiece: the Chapel of Ronchamp, which crowns one of the foothills of the Vosges Mountains. It is a place for pilgrimage, a looming form that commands the entire countryside from horizon to horizon. Ronchamp is architecture as pure image, and few images more powerful or more timeless have ever been placed before the eye.
It is strange that a man who has shown so few signs of religious feeling should have produced so awesome a place of worship. But this is no odder than the fact that the loneliest of men should have dreamed of utopian cities, or that one so dedicated to the machine has, in the end, produced an architecture that scarcely depends on the machine at all. Corbu turned his paintings into architecture, his architecture into sculpture, until "the body of the building is the expression of the three major arts in one."
He may be the coldest of the titans of his time, but he will perhaps have left the warmest legacy. "Architecture," he once said, "goes beyond utilitarian needs. You employ stone, wood and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces. That is construction. Ingenuity is at work. But suddenly you touch my heart. You do me good and I am happy and I say, 'This is beautiful.' That is Architecture. Art enters in."
