CHANDIGARH: To young residents of Chandigarh — a city bursting at its seams — images of acres of barren land, with landmark buildings still under construction would appear anything but real. However, 50 rare pictures gifted to the city by Le Corbusier Foundation, Paris, traces the changing skyline during city’s early days.

Of these, 24 black-and-white pictures have never been printed in any Indian journal and people would get to see them for the first time at the Chandigarh Carnival on November 22 in the stall to be put up by the Le Corbusier Centre, Sector 19.

“The pictures give almost blow-by-blow account of how the city came up. The Capitol Complex, Secretariat and High Court and Vidhan Sabha under construction and Le Corbusier stretching out his own hand to denote what became the city’s open-hand symbol, would interest many,” said Vidya Nand Singh, nodal officer, Le Corbusier Centre.

“The Le Corbusier Foundation is supporting the Chandigarh Centre and the pictures have been given on a special request made by the UT administration,” he said.

“In the late 50s, no effort was made to document the city’s development and most of the pictures have been taken by Corbusier’s associates, who wanted to document probably the biggest success of his life,” he said.

“The collection also has a handful of coloured prints, including the images of furniture designed by him. Corbusier standing in the middle of a large chunk of land and hectic activity on the high court building, with Shivalik Hills in the background, are a complete contrast to the ground reality today,” he said.

The collection of rare pictures are in the process of being mounted and would be put up as part of an exhibition titled ‘Le Corbusier in Chandigarh’ at the Chandigarh Carnival for two days.

Though the centre already has a large collection of pictures of Le Corbusier, the collection provided by the foundation bring out what the city looked like four decades back.

The Le Corbusier Centre is the only place in the world, which has a complete museum as the architect worked here. Paris and Zurich have their collections, but Chandigarh in itself is a museum created by him as his signatures are all over the place.