The plan starts as a rectangle and is immediately broken open: a deep, unglazed portico runs the width of the entrance front, and behind it two forms collide rather than align — a stepped pyramidal block of committee rooms and offices, and the drum of the assembly chamber itself, its roof punched by a hyperbolic-paraboloid tower that Le Corbusier likened in silhouette to a cooling tower and, before that, to the cupola of a Mughal pavilion. Members move between floors on ramps rather than stairs. A ten-foot enamelled door, its grid of squares filled with cosmic and biological symbols Le Corbusier designed himself, opens onto a forum lit by cannon-shaped light scoops cut through the roof slab. Built in raw board-marked concrete — béton brut — between 1951 and 1962 and inaugurated on 15 April 1964, the Assembly still seats two separate legislatures rather than the one it was designed for. It was inscribed with sixteen other Le Corbusier sites across seven countries as a UNESCO World Heritage property in 2016.
The Assembly exists because of an earlier partition. When British India was divided in 1947, Punjab’s historic capital, Lahore, went to Pakistan, and Jawaharlal Nehru commissioned an entirely new capital at Chandigarh to replace it — Le Corbusier’s chance to build a government from nothing. In 1966 Parliament divided Punjab again, this time along linguistic lines, carving the Hindi-speaking state of Haryana out of it under the Punjab Reorganisation Act; neither state’s claim to the shared capital was resolved, and Chandigarh instead became a Union Territory administered jointly by the centre. The one chamber Le Corbusier designed for a single state legislature is now used in alternation by two, and both the Punjab and Haryana governments continue to assert competing claims to the city as their own capital, a dispute still unresolved as of 2026.
Wikidata Q7126217 · Commons: Palace of Assembly Chandigarh.jpg · Photo: UnpetitproleX · Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0