Along with Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Louis Kahn, Le Corbusier is recognized as one of the canonical architects of the twentieth century. But even more than the others, it is Le Corbusier who exemplifies the utopian figure of the heroic architect, relentlessly waging a battle against the moribund and resurrecting in its place a whole new world. Le Corbusier's largest built project, Chandigarh, a new capital city for the divided state of Punjab in newly independent India, has played a central role not just in Le Corbusier's oeuvre but also in the construction of the modernist architect's image as a visionary iconoclast. Having lost faith in the machine age, from the mid- 1930s Le Corbusier became increasingly engrossed in reconciling the aesthetic of industrial modernization with vernacular building practices, especially in the non-Western world. The Indian government's invitation in 1950 to build a new city provided the architect with an opportunity to actualize what had until that point remained an ideal.