Chandigarh, the concrete jungle

Chandigarh is the capital of the Punjab region in northern India, located at the foothills of the Himalayas. The city was created in the early 1950s by a team of architects led by Le Corbusier, Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry. Conceived as a symbol of a newly independent India, Chandigarh sought to combine the ideals of the Modern Movement with those of the Garden City. Most of the government buildings and monuments were designed by Le Corbusier and remain among the most significant examples of modernist architecture in the world.
These photographs form part of an ongoing body of work exploring cities conceived and built from scratch according to ambitious social, political and architectural visions.
Over the past two decades, I have photographed planned capitals and utopian urban projects including Brasília in Brazil, Astana in Kazakhstan and Chandigarh in India. Through these projects, I am interested in how abstract ideas and ideals become physical landscapes, and how these cities evolve as they are inhabited, adapted and transformed over time.