Speaking from the Shadows: Human and Landscape Agency in Pierre Jeanneret’s Indian Sojourn as a Humanist

Illustrated lecture by Manu P. Sobti, prolific architectural historian and urban interlocutor of the Global South, International Engagement Director and Senior Lecturer, University of Queensland’s School of Architecture

Chair: Prof. Jyoti Pandey Sharma, Professor of Architecture, School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi

Between 1952-1965, Le Corbusier’s lesser-known cousin Pierre Jeanneret served as the collaborating Senior Architect on the monumental Chandigarh Capital Project in northern India. In its unprecedented usage of the Pierre Jeanneret Fonds at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) Archives in Montreal, this presentation explores Jeanneret’s engagements with the idyllic Punjab countryside and Chandigarh hinterland. Jeanneret’s recordings and musings were then undeniable reassertion of the complex human and landscape palimpsest that had and would experience inevitable (and substantial) erasure, while a new city emerged from these untidy ruins