Authorship and modernity in Chandigarh: the Ghandi Bhavan and the Kiran Cinema designed by Pierre Jeanneret and Edwin Maxwell Fry

Abstract

The Modernist city of Chandigarh was designed as a result of the 1948 Partition of India. After the initial appointment of Albert Mayer as lead architect and planner, Le Corbusier along with Pierre Jeanneret, Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew were selected. Whilst Le Corbusier's work in Chandigarh is relatively well known, the work of the other three European architects has not received the same degree of attention. The aim of this paper is to consider two prominent buildings, one designed by Jeanneret for Panjab University and the other a cinema hall designed by Maxwell Fry. Fry's cinema was one of the first non-residential buildings to be constructed in the city and presents an inoffensive, even sympathetic ‘established modernity’. Jeanneret's building, designed almost ten years later, begins to mark a shift from, even a rejection of the ‘stark brutality’ of the city towards an expressive formalism, drawing from different historical sources to those found in Le Corbusier's work in nearby Sector-1. These buildings, it will be argued, represent key moments in the history of the city and indeed the development of modernism and the avant-garde.