IN SEPTEMBER 2007, the architect BV Doshi delivered a lecture at the Institut Français d’Architecture in Paris in which he presented a critique of his own early work. Doshi, known for his role in designing the expansive Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, had worked with the Swiss modernist planner Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as ‘Le Corbusier’, in Paris in the early 1950s before returning to India to serve as one of Corbusier’s site architects in Chandigarh. Although deeply influenced by the Swiss architect, Doshi had since begun to wonder about the relevance of the houses in Chandigarh he had a hand in creating. In Contemporary Architects, published in the late 1980s, he expressed this sentiment: “the buildings that I have designed seem somewhat foreign... they do not appear to have their roots in the soil”.
Listening attentively in the audience to Doshi’s lecture in Paris was French photographer Manuel Bougot. “Doshi’s words were really the starting point for this work,” he said, sitting on a bench surrounded by his photographs from Chandigarh, on exhibit at PhotoInk gallery in Delhi. “At times people living in houses he had helped design would change certain things, like windows—he wanted to see how they adapted to a house that wasn’t conceived by them.”
Bougot by then had developed a serious interest in Corbusier’s imprint on Chandigarh. In 1996, he had helped a friend with a project on Corbusier’s Maisons Jaoul, a well-known pair of houses in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, and had immersed himself in the modernist master’s architectural oeuvre. With Doshi’s own impulse in mind, Bougot wanted to see for himself what the residents of Chandigarh had made of their homes.
In January 2009, he flew to Delhi and boarded a train for Chandigarh for what he called a “personal project”. “Personal because no one told me to do this,” he said. For the most part, Bougot had worked in Paris for advertising firms—assignments ranged from photographing interiors of hotels to still lifes. But in Chandigarh, he set out to document the way the city’s inhabitants negotiated with architecture by photographing homes and government buildings.
In the middle-class residential Sector 22, Bougot set off down sidewalks, with his camera bag slung around his neck and his tripod resting across his shoulder. “People would see me taking photos and invite me into their homes for tea,” he said. Sitting in their living rooms, he would work up the courage to ask if he could photograph their houses—not as Corbusier had intended them to be used, but as they were, lived in and changed over the years by their inhabitants. The people he met proudly spoke to Bougot of their families, portraits of whom hung high on walls. In the exhibit in Delhi, the modest bedrooms of families living in Sector 22 appear side-by-side with images of expansive living rooms of ex-army generals living in the more affluent Sector 5 and Sector 6.
Although Corbusier was the chief architect of Chandigarh, he didn’t design any of the residences in the city. He completed the master plan, along with plans for Sector 1, Sector 17 and Sector 22, and left the rest to a group of 20 young Indian architects, including Doshi, and Corbusier’s cousin Pierre Jeanneret. “How can I say this nicely…” Bougot began when describing Jeanneret’s work. “He didn’t have a strong personality of his own. He did everything as his cousin had said. He was almost exactly like Corbusier.”
The effect of Doshi’s reevaluations, although the initial impulse for Bougot’s project, began to fade with time. “At first I had wanted to photograph only interiors of homes,” he said. “But I found that in the end if you see the interiors of houses in Delhi, and those in Chandigarh, they’re not all that different.” Many of the homes designed by architects like Doshi, it turned out, have been swallowed up and transformed by the daily lives of Chandigarh’s inhabitants.
But some grand plans, Bougot felt, deserved such a fate. Speaking of his own hometown, he expressed relief that Corbusier’s master plan for Paris had evaporated—“it would have destroyed everything that we think of as beautiful in Paris”, he said. “But it just so happens that I bought a house recently and just next to it, just in front of my window, is a house designed by Le Corbusier.”