CHANDIGARH 1956
Le Corbusier and the Promotion of Architectural Modernity
In November 195I, Drew had her first real chance to get to know Le Corbusier at close quarters; and Le Corbusier seems to have felt instantly at ease with the vivacious and elegant young Englishwoman. Contrary to what Fry had foreseen, "Jane and Corb formed a friendship and she became on close terms with him. She could afford to pull his leg, which no-one else dared [to do]."
This new element of camaraderie brought about a significant shift in the entire hierarchy and enormous changes in the relationships within the Chandigarh project's lead team.
In the final paragraph of a letter he wrote to Jane the day after his return to Paris in December 1951, Le Corbusier confirmed that she had been able to win his trust: "I would like to take the opportunity in this letter to tell you how much I enjoyed working with you. In a departure from my usual misogyny, I saw for myself how a woman such as you not only knows how to work, but also has a grasp of what it means to be part of a team and to play a key role on that team.
I don't know if what I'm telling you will please you, but it gives me pleasure to write it." Elsewhere he remarked, "I was glad to see how Jane Drew automatically became a very useful part of our quartet."
Together with cost, climate played a major role in guiding the planners. Sunbreakers, projecting shades and canopies, and honeycombed partition walls became the hallmarks of the government housing initiative. To support these devices, whose purpose was to ameliorate the effects of both intense sunshine and the monsoon rains, special attention was paid to the orientation of the buildings so that the main rooms always faced north or north-east and hence were protected from direct sunlight. Where the house fronts were rather more exposed, provision was made for a porch or veranda to keep out the midday sun in the hot months and catch sunlight during the winter.
Jane B. Drew wrote of the sun as an enemy: "Gone is the light aeroplane look, the hovering plane of Mies van der Rohe's architecture; instead here a house is essentially a shade, a shelter from the elements. No vast glass areas to create interpenetration of exterior and interior. The extraordinary climatic variety, cold in winter, and both hot-dry and hot-wet heat in summer, dust storms and mon-soons—the sun is an enemy more often than a friend," (Architects' Yearbook, 5, 1953). The choice of building materials was governed first and foremost by their availability and price. Building in brick was three or four times less expensive than concrete or stone.
It was above all Jeanneret who concerned himself with the design of housing for those on low incomes. Building in brick, supposedly a "poor" material, he succeeded in lending his houses a vigor at once both expressive and harmonious. In the row houses, he used brick mainly as a load-bearing structure, but also for parapets, balustrades, and low boundary walls, as well as for sunbreakers, jalis, and cornices.
