architecture – Where is Phil now?

Capitol Complex, Chandigarh

Chandigarh, India
02 April 2025

There is no one specific reason why it has taken the best part of 11 months to finish writing about Chandigarh, or of my time in Delhi. I guess I just ran out of capacity to do either place the justice they deserved. To be honest, I never expected to pick this back again, but there you go. I started a new job in September and this one isn’t as mentally draining and that has helped in so many ways. So here we are with words and images on a page, almost 11 months after the event.

In his famous speech at Rajendra Park in Chandigarh on 9 November 1957, Jawaharlal Nehru shared his vision for the city with its people, saying, “It was felt that to build a new city to be the capital of Punjab would give people something new to look forward to. We wanted them to look to the future with new hope after the trauma they had been through. We felt the new capital would be a symbol of new hope.”

It was only ten or so years ago that I started to understand the impact of the 1947 partition of India. I knew that it had happened, and I knew that it split India into two; and later three when Bangladesh became its own entity in 1971, but I didn’t know much more. I’m not going to go into any detail on the cause of partition, though Britain and colonisation must carry its share of the burden of responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people and the displacement of millions more.

One of the outcomes was the splitting of the state of Punjab into two, with the state capital, Lahore, ending up on the Pakistan side of the new border, leaving Indian Punjab in need of a new capital. As noted above, Prime minister Nehru wanted to build a city for the future of the now smaller state, not one that reflected the recent architectural past of the British Raj.

There was not much to Chandigarh before Nehru hired the American architect Albert Mayer. He, working with Polish architect Matthew Nowicki, developed a plan based on a curving, organic layout. However, Nowicki was killed in a plane crash in 1950, and Mayer withdrew from the project shortly after. It was at this point, in 1951, that the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier was brought in to take over…

Le Corbusier brought in a number of other European architects to help with the design of the city centre and, equally importantly, a set of new government buildings: the Capitol Complex. He called on his cousin Pierre Jeanneret and the English couple Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, who had experience designing modernist European buildings in West Africa and understood how concrete could be used in heat and humidity. Le Corb focused on the design of the Capitol Complex while the others developed plans for the residential and commercial parts of town.

In today’s Chandigarh there isn’t a lot of accommodation choice for a solo traveller on foot who wants to stay not too far from the concrete action. The hotel I chose wasn’t great and I was the only westerner there. As I found on this India trip, most of the other western tourists were on guided tours and had drivers and organised schedules. I didn’t meet many who were solo travelling like me.

A photo of me taken by one of the ‘Americans’ inside the Secretariat – it had an amazing internal ramp. The other person is the excellent local guide the Americans had.

As usual I decided to walk to the Capitol Complex, though it was much further than I’d anticipated. The sector blocks are 1.2km long and I had two to cover, plus some meandering and then walking to the complex itself. A taxi driver I met in Christchurch went to university in Chandigarh and said that Christchurch reminded him of home, I could see what he meant. The residential streets are pleasant, something I can’t say about Delhi. Chandigarh is only 70 years old mind, not 3000.

The city was designed to be cool and light and make humans more comfortable in their surroundings. Buildings are mainly low rise; there are plenty of trees and it was pleasant walking on the shady side of the road. There are also footpaths, and surprisingly, cycle lanes, which were well used. The walk to visit an object of interest was the nicest of all my days in India, though the roads at rush hour were as busy and noisy as Delhi.

I didn’t know I had to join a guided tour to visit the Capitol Complex, though it makes sense given it is the centre of government for two Indian states (Punjab and Haryana). The tours are free, though.

I lucked in with arriving at the tourist centre just before the 10am tour was about to leave. I generally hate tours but this one, run by the complex itself, was excellent. The guide was knowledgeable and friendly, and we benefited from having a local architecture tour guide with an American couple who added local colour and history; his father was an architect on the original build. I enjoyed the company of the Americans too. My years of solo travelling are over I guess.

The tourist centre was a good introduction to this fantastic site.

The Capitol Complex was completed in the late 1950s and is a modernist/brutalist masterpiece; it’s now a UNESCO world heritage site. As it’s a government centre and security is very tight there are no cars and, other than lots of blokes with guns, there are relatively few people. It’s a large site and the concrete reflects the bright sun, it was very hot and I’m glad I had two bottles of water with me, though I gave one to the Americans as they hadn’t planned for the heat.

There are three key buildings: the High Court, the Secretariat and the Palace of the Assembly, along with a number of other features, the Open Hand Monument, the Tower of Shadows, the Martyrs Memorial and Geometric Hill.

The tour started at the High Court, though we weren’t allowed within 100 metres of the building as court was in session. That was a shame as it is a cool building with some interesting, classic Le Corbusier features that were hard to pick out from distance. Another time maybe.

The Open Hand Monument was much more impressive than I expected it to be; photos I’d seen just hadn’t captured its size and the environment it’s located in. It’s properly monumental and only having half a dozen visitors made for an enjoyable visit. The tour is time restricted, so I didn’t have as much time as I would’ve liked. I’m the glad the American couple were as interested as me as the three of us were the ones lingering and looking at all the architectural delights the most out of our small group.

In some ways the Tower of Shadows impressed me the most. It doesn’t look like much, it’s more of an experiment than anything else. Le Corbusier designed it so that not a single ray of sun enters it from any angle, with the north side remaining open because the sun never shines from that direction. It was built to prove that concrete design could be made to beat the heat in hot places and it’s remarkably effective and much cooler in the shade than it was in the sun, or other shady parts of the site.

The swastika, as seen on the side of the Martyrs Memorial, is a Hindu symbol, predating the Nazi regime by thousands of years. From the ancient Sanskrit language, it can be translated as ‘conducive to wellbeing’. They are everywhere in India, though for (some of) us westerners it can be quite jarring the first time you see one.

The Geometric Hill was created out of the rubble from the Palace of the Assembly build, fronted with a wall of concrete detailed with the movement of the sun across the sky over the 24 hours of the day. It also hides the Palace from the road.

The Palace of the Assembly is my favourite building in the complex, with the wonderful curved concrete form over the entrance and the cooling tower on the roof and the water feature at the front. It’s such a cool structure, and bigger than I expected too.

Unlike the High Court which was in operation, we were very fortunate to be visiting on a day when the governments of Punjab and Haryana were not sitting, and were allowed into the assembly chamber itself. Apparently, this is quite rare. We had to go through a vigorous security check, handing over passport, phone, camera, anything in our pockets, in fact everything other than clothes and shoes and spectacles. I have no visual record of the inside of the building which is a shame as there are some quite nice little concrete features in the atrium and halls. The assembly room itself was not too dissimilar to that of the UK government.

The final stop, and we were definitely getting a nudge along by the guides at the stage, was the Secretariat building. The tour takes you inside the building, but straight to the roof from the reception area, so this time we could bring all our stuff with us. The camera being the most important for me.

The Secretariat is a massive eight-storey slab block stretching about 250 metres. It’s essentially a giant office block housing the administrative departments for both the Punjab and Haryana state governments.

The façade is dominated by Le Corbusier’s brise-soleil (sun-breaker) system, those geometric concrete grids you can see covering the building. They’re designed to shade the interior from the harsh sun while still allowing air circulation.

The view from the roof is fantastic, I managed to sneak the gun of one of the snipers who observe the site from the roof into one of my images. There are a lot of guns about, though the mostly the atmosphere is friendly. I suspect they don’t have a lot to do, but I imagine the serious security work is performed well out of sight of us tourists.

I really liked the structures on the roof too.

And that was the end of the tour, we were shuffled back to the tour office and sent on our merry, though hot and dehydrated, way. Me, to walk back to my hotel under the mid-day sun. It was the best tour I’ve ever done, made even better by spending a couple of hours with some friendly folk and their chatty and informative guide.

In hindsight I should have found a guide to take me around. There is a lot more to Chandigarh than the Capitol Complex, and not just from a brutalist/modernist perspective; though there are some fabulous modernist residences. Having a guide with a vehicle would have made viewing those a lot easier to do.

Modern Chandigarh is nothing like anything else I’ve seen in my (albeit, limited) time in India, it’s very much a modern city. I think Nehru would approve.

The ‘art deco capital of the world’

Napier, New Zealand – Wednesday, 19 March 2025

When planning our New Zealand travels, Napier was high on the list – especially after missing it on our previous trip due to Covid restrictions. What makes this city particularly fascinating for me is its remarkable architectural story, born from a terrible (and probably terrifying) event.

On 3 February 1931, Napier experienced a catastrophic 7.8 magnitude earthquake that lasted just 2.5 minutes but completely transformed the city. The earthquake tragically killed 256 people and almost totally destroyed the city centre, as well as causing severe damage to residential areas and the surrounding countryside.

By 1933, Napier had completely reinvented itself as an art deco city. Embracing current design trends, with a local flavour, the city was rebuilt from the ground up. Remarkably, much of that 1930s rebuild remains behind and walking through the city centre today feels like stepping into a perfectly preserved 1930s film set.

With over 140 well preserved art deco buildings, the city now markets itself as the “Art Deco Capital of the World.” I would love to visit when they properly celebrate this and ban all those pesky modern cars that park in front of all the interesting bits.

We arrived in Napier after a 5 hour drive from Rotorua, and with only an afternoon in town we were out looking at buildings soon after dropping our bags in the motel, which was directly over the road from the beach. It’s always relaxing being near the sea.

We loved Napier, and I wish we’d had more time to just walk around the city centre and admire the beautifully maintained buildings under a nice blue sky. There is a (mostly) friendly vibe here.

I took a lot of photos as we walked.

It’s a small city centre and with little time we focused on the central streets. There are a couple of locations away from the business and commercial centre, though we didn’t really have time to visit them. I would have liked to have seen some of the residential properties. I’ve saved those for next time.

Late afternoon we stopped for a drink and a sit down at Community Burgers, a really nice little bar that I would’ve been very content spending more time in if I hadn’t had a burger for dinner last night. A rare bar playing decent music.

Walking back to the motel for a break before convening again for dinner, we had the only unpleasant moment of the entire trip. We got engaged in a random conversation with an oldish man, who stopped us on the street. He was clearly drunk or on something, and it started off being just a bit weird but moved on to him making an extremely racist comment, at which point we left the conversation. This resulted in him telling us to ‘F off’ and us returning the compliment, before heading off in different directions.

Luckily, we only let it ruin our day for a few minutes, and after a planned rest, we walked to the beautiful Masonic Hotel for a very nice dinner and a settling glass of wine, or three.

Brutal Day Out #7 – Bloomsbury

Sunday 14 January 2024 – Bloomsbury, London.

I’m going to claim all the credit for this most excellent Brutal Day Out photography walk. I posted on the group Instagram chat that I was going to go to Bloomsbury in central London to photograph the University College London’s two brutalist buildings; the School of Oriental and African Studies library and the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. I said that if people wanted to join me that would be great, the group organisers then turned into an ‘official’ walk and it was given the number 7. This is not a paid group or walk so I wasn’t put out by this at all, though they did drop the Royal College of Physicians from my list to add three other buildings that made more geographic sense. This was no bad thing as I wouldn’t have visited the Standard and it was great.

However, I chose to do a side trip to the Royal College of Physicians before we met at Kings Cross station as it was only a 20 minute walk away on the edge of Regents Park. I’m glad I did as it’s quite a cool building.

A quick note for anyone stumbling across this post looking for useful information on the buildings I photographed. There isn’t any; useful information that is, there are photos though.

Royal College of Physicians, opened in 1964, designed by Denys Lasdun.

I’ve been meaning to come here to photograph this building for a while and visited it briefly a couple of evenings ago before meeting friends for a drink nearby. I rarely come to this part of London. On that visit I was hoping for some interesting external lighting, but it was too dark and the rain was heavy and the light was poor so a daytime visit seemed like the right thing to do, so I just went to the pub.

Back at Kings Cross I grabbed a coffee and met the rest of the 13 strong group, surprisingly most were on time and we didn’t have to wait long for the last straggler to turn up. Having people join from all over the shop, including two from Manchester, and with increasingly unreliable public transport, means patience is sometimes required.

Our first building was almost directly over the road, the lovely ex-Camden Council head office building, now the Standard Hotel. I really like this building, though have to actually go inside. If I did I would want to be able to use the lift.

The Standard Hotel, originally built in 1974 for Camden Council, fully remodelled as a hotel, opening again in 2019.

The Brunswick Centre, opened in 1972.

Mixed use residential and retail this estate was supposed to be bigger than it is but the developers couldn’t get all the land they wanted, which (familiar story) means they had to change the original plan of building a private estate and bring the council (Camden at the time) in to help out. It was subsequently opened as part private and part council housing, and remains that way now, which I think is a good thing, though it needs a lot of money spending on it by the look of it.

I was very lucky to be invited into the residential block by a resident who saw me walking around with my camera and told me there was a great view of London from the top floor. There was, but I was more interested in the lovely concrete angles.

Some of my walk mates got invited in to look at someone’s flat which I remain a bit jealous of, though apparently it wasn’t that interesting. I have visions of residents maintaining a flat like a museum of 1970s interiors, though of course reality isn’t like that. I’m going to back one quiet Sunday morning and take some photos of the street level window boxes outside some of the flats.

IMG_6501-2

Imperial Hotel, under renovation.
I found some fabulous old phones in the carpark. Always check the carpark is my policy.

University College London.
These buildings were quite difficult to photograph, or at least I found them to be. I took a few images but wasn’t really happy with the most of them. The buildings are big, and there isn’t a vast amount of space to get a decent angle to shoot that doesn’t end up making the building look really weird, and fixing in Lightroom wouldn’t really work either.

Charles Clore House, (Institute of Advanced Legal Studies), Denys Lasdun, 1976.

The Philips Building (SOAS Library), Denys Lasdun, 1973.

Denys Lasdun featured a lot today, amongst other things he also designed the fabulous brutalist parts of the University of East Anglia in Norwich and the National Theatre on London’s Southbank. He is my favourite of the English based ‘brutalist’ architects.

It was starting to get a bit cold and we had been on our feet for 4 half hours so it was time to nip to the pub for a refreshing pint or two. It was another very enjoyable day out. One of the photographers who has been on all the walks had brought along a child’s camera, which uses till receipt thermal paper for instant black and white printing. I subsequently bought this one for next time and I’m really looking forward to trying it out on some lovely concrete.

Toy Camera

The brutal buildings of Poplar, East London

Saturday 16 September 2023 – Poplar, London.

I enjoyed the third #brutaldayout photo walk today. I’m familiar with the core of the group, though today twelve set out from the coffee shop outside Blackwall Tube station. There were thirteen in the group for a moment and we either lost someone before we set out or this person accidently joined in as we assembled then realised it was the wrong bunch of people. Either way, it was the largest group we’ve had on a walk. Herding photographers is like herding cats, and we managed to lose two people over the five hours. It was a good group though and there was a lot of chat going on.

Boe and Irony mural outside All Saints DLR station.

Poplar is an area of East London that I don’t know well, though it is home to the first king of brutalist housing, the Balfron Tower and there will be more on Balfron in a later post. Poplar is proper London east end, it’s a working class area with a post-war mix low and high rise estates. It’s a multi-racial suburb and has, in parts, been allowed to rot, though I’m not necessarily saying race was a factor in allowing that decay. There are too few loud voices here nor enough of those willing to risk standing up to push the case for the borough. Poplar is part of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, and let’s just say the council is not unafraid to make decisions very unpopular with its citizens, though seemingly very popular with developers.

Poplar should be fortunate as it rubs up against the global financial centre of Canary Wharf, whose shiny glass towers stand proudly over, but maybe casting disapproving shadows over its rundown neighbour. You would hope the wealth would roll on down to its immediate neighbour, but, as always, that is not the case. Poplar is being gentrified, and not in a ‘nice’ way. Social housing residents are moved out and those who have bought their home in ex-council properties are ‘encouraged’ to sell. The estates are flattened and ugly new shiny things are built in their place; of course there is the promise that tenants can move back in, or new housing will be built for them nearby, but as we all know this rarely happens. ‘Cost over runs’ or other excuses means the developer can never quite meet their social housing commitments. Councils just roll over and let their expanding tummy get stroked and accept the heartfelt apologies from those poor developers. The worst part is a lot of those shiny new flats are left empty, unsold or with absentee owners, almost taunting those who were dispossessed. More on this with my post regarding Balfron Tower.

Our first visit was Robin Hood Gardens Estate, or what is left of it anyway. The estate was completed in 1972 and comprised two low rise blocks, one seven storey and the other ten, with a large green space between them. It was designed by Alison and Peter Smithson and was their only housing estate to be constructed. The London Borough of Tower Hamlets was the landlord. After a battle to get the estate listed failed developers demolished the seven storey West Block in 2017 and new flats are now under construction.

The East Block is now empty and awaiting the same fate as the West. 213 families lived here, now there are none.

After taking a photo of the scaffold surrounded front door I tried the door handle and remarkably the door wasn’t locked…

All the doors to the ground floor flats were covered in steel, so to be able to access the stairwell was a real surprise. A surprise too much to resist for some of us, so we took a quick foray into the building. Ignoring the ‘no trespassing’ sign. Bad I know. We didn’t go far, up a flight of stairs to the first balcony. All the flats are blocked off and we didn’t do anything other than take a few photos and then exit. It was a cheap, no harm, thrill; and no security or police turned up (phew).

There is a short row of terraced houses at the end of the estate and those are all boarded up ready to be knocked down as well. I wonder what monstrosity will be built on this site and when? All these empty properties and we have a major housing crisis in this country. I shake my head sometimes.

From a small, litter strewn and slowly overgrowing hillock in the gardens we could get a glimpse of our next stop; Balfron Tower in the Brownfields Estate; a 10 minute walk away. My first proper view of Balfron was through this filthy graffiti smeared window. I was quite excited; this is a major work of brutalist architecture in the UK, though maybe not from this angle.

Anyway as I said above, Balfron gets its own post later. The Brownfields Estate also has the much shorter Carradale Tower situated at right angles to Balfron. Unlike Balfron, Carradale is still very much lived in. Though here is a sneak preview of why Balfron so cool.

The entire area around Balfron is fenced off, including the, possibly, excellent play area. We could only see if from afar.

The towers were both built to complement each other and to create ‘communities in the sky’, by the Hungarian design genius (and inspiration for the name for the Bond villain) Erno Goldfinger. They were built between 1965 and 1967 and (thankfully) listed in 1996, else I’m sure someone would have tried to knock them down. Goldfinger lived onsite for a few months on completion and spoke to residents about what did and didn’t work and incorporating their ideas in his next project of similar design, the Trellick Tower, which I walked past back in August last year.

As Carradale is a lived-in block there was some space to wander around the perimeter, while I don’t support taking photos of people in or near their homes, I also think it is important to acknowledge that there are certain buildings that are important works of art and need to be preserved for what they are. One way to do that is to take and share photos.

Glenkerry House sits over the road from Carradale and is also part of the Brownfields Estate. It was designed by the Goldfinger practice to mirror its predecessors opposite. Construction was completed in 1977. It’s supposedly the pinnacle of brutalist design and was the final brutalist tower constructed in London. The building is owned and run by those that live there.

We stopped at the pie and mash shop in Chrisp Street Market for lunch and a short rest, Chrisp Street is the oldest purpose built pedestrian shopping area in the UK. It’s the heart of Poplar and thankfully is yet to be ‘regenerated’, though you can see it’s coming. It was busy. A lot of the flats around the market are empty, including a nearby tower block. The market has a marvellous clock tower, designed in 1951 for the Festival of Britain delays meant it wasn’t finished until the following year.

St Marys and St Josephs Catholic Church was our next stop, a magnificent building, completed in 1952 to replace the original church that was heavily damaged during the Second World War. It definitely has a mosque vibe to its construction and wouldn’t be out of place as a Christian church somewhere in Asia.

This was followed by the equally impressive, for its amazing tower, Calvary Charismatic Baptist Church.

We completed the walk at another post-war church, St Pauls at Bow Common. Built in 1960 it has been voted the best post-war church in Britain. It was certainly different with its pulpit in the centre of the building and the parishioners sat around the minister. I quite like it.

Actually we completed the walk at a pub near Mile End station where we stopped to refresh after a hot afternoon of walking, talking and photographing modernist and brutalist architecture. It was another enjoyable outing and if you’re interested in joining the next one then let me know via a comment, we don’t have a date or a location yet; though it will probably be around Kilburn.

Buildings of Auckland City

Friday 29 October 2021 – Auckland.

Three months ago today Eleanor and I boarded Emirates EK004 out of Heathrow, landing in Auckland a mere 28 hours later. On arrival, along with all the other passengers, we were taken straight from the airport to spend 14 days in a managed isolation hotel. That now seems such a long time ago, and some days it feels like we’ve not left isolation in these last Three months. This week in particular has felt inordinately slow and I am bored, bored, bored, and probably getting rather boring with my boredom too. Nothing that I’m actually allowed to do really appeals that much either.

I’ve spent too much time this week looking through posts from when I was travelling and experiencing life beyond what feels like a city-sized extension to the four walls of the flat. I guess there’s some irony in that we’ve flown half way around the world to be in a country that is now more restricted than the UK. Travel isn’t always the answer I know. I worry that experiencing different cultures, even as a privileged tourist, is going to become difficult after Covid, and yes I worry about climate change and the impact the travel sector has on the planet and local environments as well. My plan to ‘finish’ mainland SE Asia and backpack through northern Thailand, Laos and Vietnam is looking less and less likely as time goes by.

Oh well. It’s good to have dreams, but now it’s time to get back to real life.

Wednesday and Thursday this week were solidly overcast with a clean, flat grey sky which was exactly the light I wanted for taking photos of some of the newer and taller buildings in the centre of Auckland city.

On Wednesday I spent 90 minutes walking around the western ridge of the Queen Street gully, up and around Hobson and Nelson Streets. I took the 70-200mm lens and was mainly shooting buildings from distance. On Thursday I took the same lens and spent two hours on the Eastern side, up to and around Symonds St and Grafton Rd. There are a lot of construction workers about and a small part of me wished I had done this on a Sunday as I think it would be easier to get into the lanes and narrower streets that are filled with workers on weekdays. They all seem to be out on the footpaths eating or smoking whenever I walk past. I kind of enjoyed myself, it was nice to get out and walk and I always enjoy taking photos, though I’m not overly thrilled with all the output. Interesting architecture photography is more difficult than it looks. In a break from the recent trend, there are very few trees in the below images, though I suspect there will be more coming.

I think these photos are in the order I took them in. I am offering no context or comment, but am happy to say that the more I hang about in the city the more I like it, though I still believe the council has made some poor development policy decisions over the years. I was surprised at the number of empty buildings and offices there are across the city and wonder how necessary some of this constant and disruptive construction is.

Wednesday – images taken from the east side.