Office Life in Chandigarh

The office has long been celebrated as a paradigmatic typology of the 20th century. For modern architects such as Mies van der Rohe, Gio Ponti, Arbe Jacobsen, Alvar Aalto and Karl Schwanzer, a.o. it served as a testing ground for the conceptual, technical and material innovations of their time. Flexibility, transparancy and innovation were the new paradigms and modern architects knew how to meet such demands in their open-plan floor plan set ups, in buildings of glass, steel and drywall. Many of their office buildings became icons of modernism, as they attest to their great hopes and ambitions. And yet, when it comes to the specific workplaces they contain, some of the pitfalls modernism is criticized for today become apparent. This becomes most obvious in the office spaces Le Corbusier designed for Chandigarh, the new capital of Punjab.

This commented photo essay presents photographs of Le Corbusier´s Chandigarh offices by Shaun Fynn, picturing various different workplaces and hereby aims to shed light on the daily life of clerks working there.