City in India Sitting on It's Architectural Heritage

I read a fascinating article in the New York Times today about a small, modernist city in India called Chandigarh who has recently fallen victim to a sort of "Antiques Road Show" phenomena of its very own. For the last few years a handful of bright antiques dealers have become regular visitors to the government junkyards in Chandigarh, the experimental modernist city concieved by architect Le Corbusier in the 1950's. They've been snapping up disused stocks of furniture create by the architects colleagues to equip the city.

It's doubtful that anyone would have blinked an eye--just a bunch of teak junk being carted off by some foreigners. Fine. Big Deal. Good riddance. Wrongo-or at least in the opinion of Christie's Auction House in NYC. A pair of teak, cane backed and bottomed chairs created for a civil service office will go on sale in the near future with a starting reserve of $8,000 to $12,000 buckeroos.

No surprise some turbans blew off in Chandigarh.

A local architect Rajnish Wattas, principal of the Chandigarh College of Architecture says "we found out we were sitting on a pot of gold, quite literally. But the dealers had realized much earlier that there was BIG money to be made." (that's why they're dealers Mr. Wattas-its their job).

There was nothing illegal about the purchases made by foreign dealers, much of which was being thrown away or sold off for rupees by the city's administration. But, quite belatedly heritage experts are lamenting the loss of a vital part of their city's original design.

The majority of the design of the city was completed by Le Corbusier's cousin Jeanneret. Jeanneret was passionate about creating simple, functional, long lasting furniture that echoed the style and ethos of the surrounding Le Corbusier buildings. There were no shops in the new city to buy furnishings-so the architects literally had them created. Jeanneret didn't stop with the interiors of city buildings, he also designed manhole covers (with beautifully detailed maps of the city embossed in them) light fixtures, lampposts, even the pedal-boats in the man-made lake in the middle of the city.

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.

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.

Oh, I'm so jealous.....