Architect's dream

The towers of two crumbling Hindu temples look down on the Valley of Chandigarh, on its scattered mango farms, its monkeys, deer and wild pigs, its blue jays and peacocks. For weeks now the jays have been screaming and the monkeys chattering because a group of Indian engineers have invaded their valley. The engineers are looking for well sites; they are going to build a city in the Valley of Chandigarh.

The Punjab was split when India was partitioned in 1947 and the ancient Punjab Capital, Lahore, went to Pakistan. The Indian province decided to build an entirely new city for its capital. Such planned capitals are rare. Peter the Great built St. Petersburg on piles in uninhabited marshes; Major Pierre Charles l'Enfant designed Washington for the Potomac swamps, and a U.S. architect, Walter Burley Griffin, drew up the plans for Australia's Canberra, which replaced a sheep station in a wide, shallow river valley.

Unfettered. To plan the new city, Indian officials picked Albert Mayer, 52, a Manhattan architect. During World War II, when he was stationed in India as a lieutenant colonel of Army engineers, Mayer went out of his way to get to know some of the problems of India, and its people, including Jawaharlal Nehru, now Prime Minister.

When the Punjab hired Mayer, Nehru said: "Let this be a new town symbolic of the freedom of India, unfettered with the traditions of the past." Designer Mayer was delighted with the prospect. Said he: "To a planner it is tremendously exciting. We start with just a blank sheet of paper and do as wonderfully or as badly as we can. It is an architect's dream."

Mayer first consulted microclimatologists, who study climate in specific areas; with their help he hopes to achieve what Major l'Enfant failed to accomplish in Washington—an arrangement of buildings that will catch any stray breeze.

Mayer's Punjab city plan is composed of units called superblocks. Each superblock covers a rectangle approximately 1,000 yards long and 500 yards wide. A superblock is designed to house 5,000 people, includes a central area with elementary schools, playgrounds and parks, and a shopping center.

Three superblocks make up a district, with the high schools, swimming pool and auditorium for the district in the center superblock. Only footpaths, bicycle and bullock-cart paths cross the superblocks: all bus, truck and automobile traffic goes around them; for direct traffic to the capitol from outside the city, two wide highways, called greenways, run from end to end of the city. A rivulet running through the valley will be dammed at one end for a lake which will reflect the capitol buildings. The city will start with a population of 150,000, can be expanded to 500,000.

Read more.