The building of Chandigarh, the new capital city of the Punjab, provided the first important threshold in the emergence of contemporary Indian architecture.

Le Corbusier came to this ancient land with a powerful vision of the future – and acted as a decisive catalyst, triggering off our nascent sense of architectonic form and syntax.

Inspired by this vision, young Indian architects studied the work of the other great modern masters of Europe and America – in the process producing new archetypes for an industrialising society, and using the mythic overlays of rationality and functionalism to generate imaginative new forms.