In 1958 a government official employed by the
Public Works Department as a roads inspector, began construction on what is now
known as the Rock Garden of Chandigarh. Over the course of fourteen years Nek
Chand Saini (b. 1924) gathered stones, scrap metal, bicycle parts, tires,
tissue, glass, ceramic and wire, to realise a small kingdom populated by
pottery elephants, horses, monkeys, gods, goddesses and thousands of human
figures. Located in a publically owned forest reserve and structured around a
series of bridges, gorges, passageways, courtyards, streams and waterfalls, the
vast garden remained undiscovered until 1972.
Figures in Nek Chand's Rock Garden. Image: Carol Mitchell
The Rock Garden was constructed in the shadow
of and in tandem with Le Corbusier’s modernist new town: Chand collected recyclables
and discarded material from villages demolished to make way for the city, he
chose a site designated a land conservatory for the new capital and even
convinced government employed workers to labour on his parallel building site.
Designated a ‘garden’, it is arguably also a differently imagined city.
Constructed from the detritus of former habitations, labyrinthine in form and
crammed with brightly coloured constructions, Chand’s hidden world exists in
stark and seemingly diametric opposition to the aesthetic ideals explicit in
the architecture of Chandigarh.
More illuminating perhaps is to consider the
possible contact points between these two architectural projects: one carried
out the public eye and marking an attempt to realise a particular vision of
India’s future, the other undertaken in secret but similarly guided by a desire
to in some way reflect the identity of a newly-partitioned nation.
Elsa Richardson
Further reading:
No comments:
Post a Comment