Priya Gupta
Tekton
Tekton: Volume 12, Issue 1, June 2025
pp. 48 – 69
Priya Gupta, PhD, currently an Associate Professor at Jindal School of Art and Architecture, OP Jindal Global University, completed her doctoral degree from Faculty of Architecture, CEPT, Ahmedabad. Her Ph.D. research analyses the impact of regulations on Chandigarh’s private houses. She has been in academia for ten years, teaching and researching at CCA, Chandigarh, and briefly at CEPT, Ahmedabad. Her areas of interest are 20th-Century Modern Architecture, Design Pedagogy, Walkability in South Asian cities, and Chandigarh’s revisionist history and everyday urban life.
neethu.mathew.phd21@cept.ac.in
ABSTRACT
Chandigarh has been a canonical reference within modern architecture and planning in India and Le Corbusier’s oeuvre. However, Chandigarh, from the premise of a new city post-independence, a new capital for a partitioned Punjab, a new home for partitioned migrants, or the role of the complete Capitol Project Team, including Indian counterparts beside and despite Le Corbusier, becomes visible at the actual site of habitation – the house. The private houses, known as the Marla houses, represent this complex palimpsest but are also unique because they were subjected to Development Controls, a set of aesthetic and volumetric regulations. They were organic and piecemeal but set a visually robust schema that bestowed an architectural identity of the Chandigarh Style and ensured the posterity of Chandigarh’s modern architecture. This paper focuses on the evolution of the regulated façade of Marla house as a site of impositions and negotiations. The façade configuration has been analysed by conducting an architectural survey of houses – photographic documentation and architectural drawings; an archival study of the evolution of controls, and semi-structured interviews with residents (20), architects (7), experts (2) and stakeholders (7) in the local administration. The study of the facades of houses represents a revisionist history of Chandigarh’s domestic architecture under the evolving imposed aesthetic regime.
KEY WORDS
Marla House, Aesthetics, Perception
