A city that sat on its treasures, but didn’t see them

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 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 about $10, “perhaps, at a junkyard.”

A pair of chairs identical to Mr. Kanwar’s, 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 about 150 miles north of New Delhi, conceived by the architect Le Corbusier in the 1950s. There they buy up disused stocks of furniture that was specially created by Corbusier’s colleagues to equip the new city.

The disappearance of large quantities of these distinctive, ultrafunctional tables and chairs — most of them designed by Mr. Jeanneret, Le Corbusier’s cousin, for the city’s government offices, courtrooms and colleges — has begun to alarm architects and some officials in the city.

Rajnish Wattas, principal of the Chandigarh College of Architecture, was stunned when he saw the catalog 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,” he said. “But the dealers had realized much earlier that there was big money to be made.”

The process by which the furniture left the city’s offices and made its way to New York and Paris reflected 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 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,” Mr. 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.” Last fall, he founded Chandigarh’s Heritage Furniture Committee, in an attempt to archive the remaining stocks of the Jeanneret designs. But little progress has been made.

Mr. 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.”

Mr. 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 armrests instead of simple cane. Local workshops were commissioned to turn them out, and thousands were made.

Despite the striking simplicity of the chairs’ 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 storerooms and occasionally auctioned “for peanuts,” Mr. 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.”

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.

A Paris dealer, Eric Touchaleaume, first came to Chandigarh in 1999, and started buying at government sales. Much of his collection was auctioned at Christie’s in New York last summer: a manhole cover, designed by Mr. Jeanneret, molded with the map of Chandigarh, was listed with a reserve of $20,000, alongside daybeds, stools, armchairs and bookcases.

In an e-mail message from his Paris showroom, Galerie 54, he said that such was the level of neglect for Mr. Jeanneret’s designs that disused furniture was being chopped up for firewood. “I always paid on average 100 times more than what the local dealers were offering,” he wrote, adding that he hoped that the attention the New York sale had attracted locally might encourage Chandigarh to value its heritage more highly.

Kiran Joshi, a professor of architecture at the Chandigarh College of Architecture, agreed that the dealers were perhaps not to blame. “It’s not the collectors that were the problem,” she said. “The problem is our perception of heritage. We thought it was junk; our government thought it was junk.”

The city authorities, who are applying for Unesco World Heritage status, have ordered that no more furniture be auctioned, and prisoners in the local jail have been commissioned to start restoring some of the broken pieces.

Mr. Sharma said the disappearance of the furniture was symptomatic of a broader disregard for Le Corbusier’s work.

“There is a general lack of appreciation here of Chandigarh’s architecture by the administration and the general public,” he said. “Truly, I feel very sad.”

(via New York Times)