Vagaries of time: Pierre Jeanneret’s legacy broken to pieces in Chandigarh

Amarjot Kaur
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, July 9

Architecturally valuable and culturally priceless, a cemented sculpture designed by Pierre Jeanneret at the nursery wing of Government Model Senior Secondary School, Sector 16, is lying in a shambles, broken in three pieces and neglected by the UT Administration.

In its former glory, as seen in a few pictures available on record, the white sculpture stands erect in the backdrop of a serpentine ramp extending from the stone-wall facade of the school, located right next to Punjab Kala Bhawan. Not long ago, a local guide, Sanjeev Sharma, chanced upon it while attending a phone call. “A few months ago, I was here for some work and had stepped out to take a phone call. As I walked in the school playground, I saw a cement like structure that was half covered by a sheet of dead leaves. I thought it was a bench, so I started brushing the leaves aside and sat on it to talk in peace. When I got up, I was intrigued by the scale of the structure, so I continued to brush the leaves aside. I found three chunks of cement half-dug in the ground. I took pictures of it,” said Sharma.

It took Sharma months to decipher what he had seen at the school. Clueless, he took the pictures to Deepika Gandhi, director, Le Corbusier Centre, Chandigarh, who was also instrumental in restoration of Pierre Jeanneret’s house as the Jeanneret Museum.

“Madam found a picture of the sculpture in the old edition of Marg magazine and that’s how I got to know that it was designed by Pierre Jeanneret,” he added.

When contacted, Gandhi said the sculpture was a rare one, which had not been recorded widely.

In fact, apart from the picture in one of the oldest art and architecture magazines, the only real picture of the sculpture available on Internet is on a blog titled ‘Mondoblogo’ by Patrick Parrish.

The author of ‘The Hunt: Navigating the Worlds of Art and Design’ and owner of Patrick Parrish Gallery, an art gallery in New York City, Parrish shared the sculpture’s picture on his blog.

The picture had been taken from ‘Chandigarh 1956 Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Jane B Drew, E Maxwell Fry’ photographs by Ernst Scheidegger.

“In March this year, UT’s Department of Urban Planning was intimated about the sculpture’s deplorable condition and a request for its restoration was proposed to the Engineering Department by involving Chandigarh Lalit Kala Akademi and the Department of Education. However, Covid’s second wave brought everything to a staggering halt,” said Gandhi.

Sumit Kaur, former UT Chief Architect, who prepared the expert heritage report, nomination dossier for the Capitol Complex for UNESCO world heritage site and the city’s first master plan, said the school’s building had been listed as a heritage building in a Government of India approved report on ‘Chandigarh’s enlisted heritage – its preservation, conservation, management and maintenance’.

“This report has been incorporated in the city’s first notified master plan. It’s not just the sculpture, but its setting in the site of the nursery school, its integration with the building which needs to be looked into and restored. The sculpture speaks volumes about the passion and detailing with which the city has been designed,” she says.

As for architect Kunal Mathur, the sculpture is a memorabilia of his father BP Mathur’s association with Jeanneret and his childhood.

In a picture shared by his brother Tarun Mathur, Kunal poses on top of the sculpture with his mother and relatives.

“I was right there when this sculpture was being made. I would accompany my father most of the time. The event of site execution was quite a fanfare with the entire staff of assistants. It took two days for the sculpture to be made. The entire team Capitol Complex, including labourers, would sit together and have meals there,” he recollected.

The piece of art, conceptualised in the 1950s is learnt to be worth lakhs, if not crores, as the heritage furniture designed by Jeanneret has been auctioned for crores abroad on several instances in the past.

“To me, it seems the sculpture is inspired from the large horns of local buffaloes. Jeanneret explored the rich clay for bricks and spent time in his home workshop developing clay forms. The sculpture developed with stiff mix of concrete and simple scaffolding but no shuttering. If this sculpture was to be auctioned anywhere in France, I am sure it would not go under the hammer for less than a few crores,” said Mathur.

Sangeeta Bagga, Principal, Chandigarh College of Architecture, suggested that the college could provide technical support for the restoration of the sculpture.

“I remember playing on it as a kid. There is no literature on the concept of this sculpture. It’s interpretive. But through discussions, it appears to be a child’s arms raised in the sky,” said Bagga.

For all its interpretation, the sculpture now only appears to be an Ozymandias-like irony, reminiscent of artistic details in passionate, experimental escapades of modernism and post-modernism that defined the newness of an era so far gone. Will this broken beauty be restored? “No comments,” said UT Chief Architect Kapil Setia.

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