With multiple components and challenges relating to the HC building, the UT administration, in its concept note, mentioned all the relevant points, explaining the current challenges and requirement. The UT also informed the GoI and Foundation Le Corbusier about the Chandigarh Heritage Conservation Committee’s (CHCC) understanding on the subject, focusing on balanced development.There are three segments of the note, covering ‘Context and Significance’, ‘Challenges and Evolution’, and ‘Concept Vision’ for the property. In ‘Concept Vision’ segment, the authority talks of redressing the shortfalls while conserving the site. The concept vision segment reads, “The Holistic Development Plan offers a transformative opportunity to redress these shortfalls while conserving the site’s unique built heritage. To paraphrase Le Corbusier, it restores to the complex ‘space and light and order’ — harmonising modernist legacy with contemporary judicial demands through sensitive expansion, rational planning, and enhanced public accessibility. This was the thrust of the CHCC’s (Chandigarh Heritage Conservation Committee) discussions during the presentation on the holistic development plan made by Design Associates, the architect engaged for the project by the UT administration.”It further says, “The concept also addresses the glaring shortfalls in facilities, infrastructure, parking, and, most importantly, the public space in the high court by consolidating and reorganising the scattered outbuildings at the rear of the complex into a clean, purist-inspired mass interlinked to the adjacent structures with light-filled atriums. The CHCC (Chandigarh Heritage Conservation Committee), understanding the need for balancing development with conservation, agreed to forward the concept design to the Foundation Le Corbusier for inclusion in the under-preparation International Management Plan for the UNESCO World Heritage Site. The process of statutory approvals, backed by extensive studies and impact assessments, will now begin in earnest to ensure the proposed development does not just respect the site but contributes significantly to enhancing its character.”In its challenges and evolution segment, the UT says that archival drawings from 1954 already proposed additional buildings to accommodate the courts’ growing workload. Instead, a multiplicity of structures proliferated organically over time to meet emergent needs. “Today, surging litigation, footfall, and vehicular loads left the complex under-provisioned across key parameters: courtrooms, office spaces, areas for litigants and lawyers, and open public realms,” it reads.Box: Context and significanceExplaining the context and significance, the UT in its note said set against the Shivalik foothills, Chandigarh’s Capitol Complex — with its expansive public spaces and monumental buildings — embodies the ideals of India’s emerging democracy: transparency, order, and modernity, rendered “in raw concrete.” The Chandigarh administration further says that Le Corbusier envisioned Chandigarh as “a city of trees, of flowers and water, of houses as simple as those at the time of Homer, and of a few splendid edifices of the highest level of modernism, where the rules of mathematics will reign.” “Completed in 1950, the Punjab and Haryana high court, with its iconic inverted parasol form, was the first such edifice on the Capitol site. In 2016, the Capitol Complex — along with 16 other Le Corbusier projects across 7 countries — was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List as The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier, an Outstanding Contribution to the Modern Movement,” the administration says in its concept note.Box:Though the process to design the detailed holistic expansion and developmental plan of the high court is already underway, the UT recently hired the Delhi-based firm for the same. The firm, selected via an expression of interest (EoI), is tasked with a dual mandate: drafting a comprehensive development plan and securing a gauntlet of approvals from the govt of India, the Chandigarh Heritage Committee, and UNESCO.
