Chandigarh Capitol Complex

The Chandigarh Capitol Complex, in the Indian city of Chandigarh, was designed by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret and the British architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, its foundation stone laid on November 1, 1952, as the seat of government for a newly created state capital built after India's 1947 partition. The complex comprises three principal buildings, the Palace of Assembly, the Secretariat and the Punjab and Haryana High Court, set across roughly 100 hectares alongside four sculptural monuments including the Open Hand and the Tower of Shadows and an artificial lake. Built in raw exposed concrete, or beton brut, the buildings apply Le Corbusier's Five Points of Architecture and his Modulor system of human proportion, and their double skinned roofs and brise-soleil sunshades were engineered to control the region's intense heat without mechanical cooling. UNESCO inscribed the complex as a World Heritage Site in 2016, as part of a seventeen site listing covering Le Corbusier's architectural work across three continents.