This work sets out to explore the role played by Pierre Jeanneret in the design and construction of the city of Chandigarh between 1951-65. In the enormous task of anchoring the Chandigarh project Jeanneret played the role as faithful executioner of Le Corbusier’s visions both for the Capitol complex and the wider city.
Jeanneret was an innovative bricoleur leaving a trail of his furniture and architecture across the city. The paper begins to explore the dynamics between Jeanneret as the anchor to Le Corbusier’s architectural acrobatics.One must hold up a Corb shaped filter to try and find Pierre in the half light behind the glare of Le Corbusier’s persona. Pierre quietly floats by on a car tire in the sea of architectural literature fixated on Le Corbusier. Although there is currently little architectural writing directly focused on Pierre Jeanneret, he was never far from the thoughts of Charlotte Perriand or Le Corbusier, who respectively left to posterity an autobiography and copious archives of correspondence from which much can be deduced. This text aims to uncover something of the complex relationship between the Jeanneret cousins and the individuality of Pierre Jeanneret’s work.
Jeanneret’s career is a case of hiding in plain sight, his contribution to the success of Le Corbusier’s life time corpus has largely been obscured by the passage of time, by his reserved personality and the endlessly propelled Le Corbusier’s mythology. Perriand, Xenakis and Wogensky also never managed to fully escape the Corbusian event horizon.Drawing on direct observation of the multitude of built work in Chandigarh executed by the cousins the text examines something of the humanity of both protagonists, and acts as is an introduction to their lost time zone.
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