Outlook has an article on the sale. About two years too late. Anyone remember that 'taters' thread when the tendency was spotted?1
Of interest, especially, are the academic-cons who seem to be opposing the very policy they helped foster. (anyone remember the 'inside-outside people' thread?)2
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But oblivious to its worth, this rich heritage today lies carelessly strewn around in various offices, gathers dust in government storerooms, or is sold off at auctions. A lot has been replaced by newer, fancier furniture. "No one wants this plain furniture any more," says Balwinder Saini, a senior architect in the UT administration whose office is one of the few which still retains some of the original furniture. It was only when a pair of stools fetched ,23,400 at a Paris sale that Chandigarh woke up in absolute disbelief. "For sometime now I've seen those wood and cane benches being used by security guards outside some judge's houses," says an architect. "No one even gives them a second look."
Except for these collectors whose canny, covetous eyes readily spotted what the administration sat blindly on. Cashing in on ignorance in some cases and the connivance of corrupt officials in other cases, they made merry plundering the Le Corbusier-Pierre Jeanneret artefacts and whisking them away overseas. Till two senior professors from the Chandigarh College of Architecture drew attention to the "organised looting" of the city's heritage.
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Particularly vulnerable now are the hundreds of sketches and drawings of various buildings as also the woollen tapestries in the high court and the assembly. Joshi points to the huge cache of documents and models lying in the storerooms of the chief architect and the chief engineer, almost as trash, which needs to be retrieved and taken care of. "Many of the things are now simply not there. For example, a model of the Open Hand monument (Chandigarh's symbol) and models of open air theatres are missing, although Corbusier's letter says he sent them to Chandigarh," she says. One such cedarwood model was of the Tower of Shadows in the capitol complex, which was auctioned for $33,600. It was executed by Giani Rattan Singh (his son is now an employee of the architecture department) who was then the official maker of architectural models of Corbusier's buildings.
[attached image: Chandigarh, down the drain :-)]
