Postwar Abstraction: Similarities, Differences, and Other Ophthalmologic Conundrums

More than anyone else, it was Le Corbusier who exemplified the utopian figure of the heroic architect, relentlessly resurrecting a whole new world after the ravages of World War II. Le Corbusier's largest built project, Chandigarh, the new capital city of Punjab in newly independent India, has certainly played a central role in the construction of the architect's image as a visionary iconoclast. Departing from this image, this chapter uses Chandigarh like a mirage, an optical phenomenon, to make visible a peculiar dialectic between postwar abstraction and large-scale industrial modernization in 1950s and 1960s India. While the dialectic between modernism and the crisis of nuclearization has long shaped our understanding of the postwar era, the recalcitrant story of postcolonial trajectories of modernism and industrial modernization that this chapter recounts opens this dialectic to heterogeneous global arrangements.