Chandigarh- Avant-Garde
Amelia Gentleman writes about office furniture from Chandigarh being auctioned at Christies for $12,000.
Every working day for the past 20 years, Suresh Kanwar, a civil engineer in Chandigarh's forestry department, has been sitting on the same battered wooden chair, an object which he said had "no beauty," even if it was, "for office use, very comfortable."
Hazarding a guess as to its value, he suggested 400 rupees, or $10, "perhaps, at a junkyard."
A pair of identical chairs, instantly recognizable to collectors as Pierre Jeanneret teak "V-chairs," will go on sale at the auction house Christie's in New York this month with a reserve of $8,000 to $12,000.
A handful of antique dealers from around the world have become regular visitors to government junkyards in Chandigarh, the experimental modernist city 250 kilometers, or 155 miles, north of New Delhi, conceived by the architect Le Corbusier in the 1950s. They buy up disused stocks of furniture that was specially created by Corbusier's colleagues to fit out the new city.
The disappearance of large quantities of these distinctive, ultrafunctional tables and chairs - most of them designed by Jeanneret, Le Corbusier's cousin, for the city's government offices, courtrooms and colleges - has begun in recent months to alarm architects and some government officials in the city.
Rajnish Wattas, principal of the Chandigarh College of Architecture, was stunned when he saw the catalogue for a sale at Christie's New York last June, titled "Chandigarh."
"We found out that we were sitting on a pot of gold - quite literally. But the dealers had realized much earlier that there was big money to be made."
The process by which the avant-garde furniture left the city's offices and made its way to New York and Paris reflects a broader ambivalence among the public toward Le Corbusier's heritage in Chandigarh and widespread official neglect of his work.
There was nothing illegal about the purchase by foreign dealers of the furniture, much of which was being thrown out or sold off by the city's administration. But very belatedly, heritage experts in Chandigarh are lamenting the loss of a vital part of the city's original design.
"It is a tragic misunderstanding," Wattas said. "I wish the scandal had come out earlier and then maybe we could have clung on to much more than we have now." In the autumn, he founded Chandigarh's Heritage Furniture Committee, in an attempt to archive the remaining stocks of Jeanneret's designs, but little progress has been made, and there is no certainty about how much is left. "It has become very, very invisible in the last five years," he said.
Jeanneret, who later took over from his cousin as Chandigarh's chief architect, was passionate about creating furniture that echoed the style and ethos of the surrounding buildings.
"There were no furniture shops, no carpet shops, so the architects designed their own," said M.N. Sharma, an architect who worked closely with Le Corbusier. "The furniture Jeanneret designed is naturally in the same spirit as the city, in the same school of thought - it is functional, and used locally available material and craftsmen."
Jeanneret paid extraordinary attention to detail - designing lampposts, municipal light fixtures, manhole covers, even the pedal-boats in the huge artificial lake at the heart of the city. He designed several versions of the basic chairs, with modifications for more senior bureaucrats, like leather backs and arm rests instead of simple cane. Local workshops were commissioned to turn them out, and thousands were made.
Despite the striking simplicity of their design, few of the city's employees gave the furniture a second glance.
Gradually, as the furniture fell into disrepair, it was thrown into government store rooms and occasionally auctioned off, "for peanuts," Wattas said, usually to local carpenters who broke it up and reused the increasingly expensive teak. "People wanted new and glossy stuff: synthetic leather, Scandinavian design, metallic furniture."
"This was not something very easy to fathom," Wattas said. "It doesn't look ornate, or like it comes from a palace. One might take care of something that was 100 or 200 years old, but this was 20 years old." India's export laws classify antiques as objects more than 100 years old, which made it easy for collectors to take the objects out of the country.
The Paris dealer Eric Touchaleaume first came to Chandigarh in 1999, and started making purchases from the government sales. Much of the collection he built up was auctioned at Christie's in New York last summer - a manhole cover, designed by Jeanneret, molded with the map of Chandigarh, was listed with a reserve of $20,000, alongside daybeds, stools, armchairs and bookcases.
Thanks Contemporary Africa for the link
Every working day for the past 20 years, Suresh Kanwar, a civil engineer in Chandigarh's forestry department, has been sitting on the same battered wooden chair, an object which he said had "no beauty," even if it was, "for office use, very comfortable."
Hazarding a guess as to its value, he suggested 400 rupees, or $10, "perhaps, at a junkyard."
A pair of identical chairs, instantly recognizable to collectors as Pierre Jeanneret teak "V-chairs," will go on sale at the auction house Christie's in New York this month with a reserve of $8,000 to $12,000.
A handful of antique dealers from around the world have become regular visitors to government junkyards in Chandigarh, the experimental modernist city 250 kilometers, or 155 miles, north of New Delhi, conceived by the architect Le Corbusier in the 1950s. They buy up disused stocks of furniture that was specially created by Corbusier's colleagues to fit out the new city.
The disappearance of large quantities of these distinctive, ultrafunctional tables and chairs - most of them designed by Jeanneret, Le Corbusier's cousin, for the city's government offices, courtrooms and colleges - has begun in recent months to alarm architects and some government officials in the city.
Rajnish Wattas, principal of the Chandigarh College of Architecture, was stunned when he saw the catalogue for a sale at Christie's New York last June, titled "Chandigarh."
"We found out that we were sitting on a pot of gold - quite literally. But the dealers had realized much earlier that there was big money to be made."
The process by which the avant-garde furniture left the city's offices and made its way to New York and Paris reflects a broader ambivalence among the public toward Le Corbusier's heritage in Chandigarh and widespread official neglect of his work.
There was nothing illegal about the purchase by foreign dealers of the furniture, much of which was being thrown out or sold off by the city's administration. But very belatedly, heritage experts in Chandigarh are lamenting the loss of a vital part of the city's original design.
"It is a tragic misunderstanding," Wattas said. "I wish the scandal had come out earlier and then maybe we could have clung on to much more than we have now." In the autumn, he founded Chandigarh's Heritage Furniture Committee, in an attempt to archive the remaining stocks of Jeanneret's designs, but little progress has been made, and there is no certainty about how much is left. "It has become very, very invisible in the last five years," he said.
Jeanneret, who later took over from his cousin as Chandigarh's chief architect, was passionate about creating furniture that echoed the style and ethos of the surrounding buildings.
"There were no furniture shops, no carpet shops, so the architects designed their own," said M.N. Sharma, an architect who worked closely with Le Corbusier. "The furniture Jeanneret designed is naturally in the same spirit as the city, in the same school of thought - it is functional, and used locally available material and craftsmen."
Jeanneret paid extraordinary attention to detail - designing lampposts, municipal light fixtures, manhole covers, even the pedal-boats in the huge artificial lake at the heart of the city. He designed several versions of the basic chairs, with modifications for more senior bureaucrats, like leather backs and arm rests instead of simple cane. Local workshops were commissioned to turn them out, and thousands were made.
Despite the striking simplicity of their design, few of the city's employees gave the furniture a second glance.
Gradually, as the furniture fell into disrepair, it was thrown into government store rooms and occasionally auctioned off, "for peanuts," Wattas said, usually to local carpenters who broke it up and reused the increasingly expensive teak. "People wanted new and glossy stuff: synthetic leather, Scandinavian design, metallic furniture."
"This was not something very easy to fathom," Wattas said. "It doesn't look ornate, or like it comes from a palace. One might take care of something that was 100 or 200 years old, but this was 20 years old." India's export laws classify antiques as objects more than 100 years old, which made it easy for collectors to take the objects out of the country.
The Paris dealer Eric Touchaleaume first came to Chandigarh in 1999, and started making purchases from the government sales. Much of the collection he built up was auctioned at Christie's in New York last summer - a manhole cover, designed by Jeanneret, molded with the map of Chandigarh, was listed with a reserve of $20,000, alongside daybeds, stools, armchairs and bookcases.
Thanks Contemporary Africa for the link
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