PUBLIC SPACE: Somewhere Between Success and Failure
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When modernist architects dreamed a new form of public life, they imagined a liberated ground: Freed from the suffocation of narrow streets, people would roam among monuments, communing with a newly ordered nature that would receive them like an "open hand." At the Chandigarh Capitol Complex in northern India, architect Le Corbusier's hand hovers like a ghost above his decaying dreamscape. But don't be fooled by the emptiness: For half the day, this space is teeming with people, filled with the eclectic chaos of an informal economy. Every morning a market appears, every afternoon it disappears. And to this day, the jury is out on whether this daily injection of chaos is an architectural success or a failure. Public life in spite of architecture? Or public architecture as enabler for life? The emblem of yesterday's architectural heroism has become an icon for the insecurities of today's urban planners. When the space is vacated, as shown here in a photograph by Dominique Gonzalez-Forester, all that's left from the Western imagination's most radical attempt to organize public space is a lesson in the sublime.
