Le Corbusier’s famous Capitol Complex in Chandigarh, India is about to be ruined by the construction of a gaggle of towers to its immediate north. The new project, called ‘TATA Camelot’, is being developed by TATA Housing, the real estate wing of TATA Group, a major multinational and one of India’s largest industrial companies. TATA Camelot’s 27 proposed towers, each between 13 and 36 storys tall, will not only destroy the architectural and urban design integrity of the Capitol, they will also disrupt the fragile Himalayan ecology of the area. In the contest between development and preservation, it is the larger public good and the long term perspective of the ecological that must be prioritized. ...

It seems to Dr. Prakash that thinking of preservation as the process of managing change, rather than just fossilizing the past, is a more productive framework for rethinking Chandigarh’s modernist heritage. Modernism itself, after all, was a great rethinking of the past, of the value of history to the present and future. Preservation as managing change suggests that long shadow of history must not be a threat to the possibilities of the future, but a guiding light. Built as a modernist, utopian state enterprise, an administrative city with ecological master planning, Chandigarh today is a real-estate mecca. In other words, it is the non-privatized larger civic and ecological values that are inscribed in the Chandigarh vision that have fundamentally generated its real-estate value. Good design works, and ultimately adds value to the life of the average citizen, beyond a privileged set of stakeholders.

By contrast, TATA Camelot is focused singularly on profit maximization, exploiting an unintended loophole in the law. Not only is it destructive to the past, it doesn’t offer or participate in alternative urban or ecological vision. In the backyard of Chandigarh, this is incorrigible. The TATAs, and the master-planners of Chandigarh’s future, must be held to a higher standard.