MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

Two principal approaches towards modern architecture of the 1950s can be distinguished. The first can be described as a regionalist approach that focused on the climate and geography of a region, but paid little attention to cultural analysis or existing vernacular tradition. This can be illustrated by the various 'African experiments' — regionalist modernist projects of the leading British architects Maxwell Fry (1899-1987) and Jane Drew (1911-1996) in West African countries that were then part of the British Empire. In the 1950s the couple joined Le Corbusier to work on the creation of Chandigarh, the new capital of the divided Punjabin India. The modernist architecture of Chandigarh is widely regarded as one of the prominent experiments in urban planning and a symbolic statement of the radical break from tradition and colonial past of the newly independent India. Although the purity of the modernism was initially supposed to be protected “from whims of individuals” by the Edict of Chandigarh (as prescribed by Le Corbusier), the universal functionalism of modernist residential architecture has been challenged by various forms of ad hoc urbanism, inspired by local traditions of urban life.