About
Modernist Conjunctures is a figurative map that articulates the intersections of the developmental promises of modernist aesthetics, the undercurrent flows of “intellectual and material wealth...in the modern world,” as Le Corbusier put it, and the production of (post-) colonial state and national identity through urban, monumental practice (Le Corbusier qtd. In Fynn 9). The design of this map is inspired by Charles-Joseph Minard’s famous Carte Figurative as well as Le Corbusier’s visual aesthetics and iconic lexicon (while actually commenting on his opportunism, fascist leanings, and the failure of his modernist projects rather than their poetic and social harmony). Therefore, our project sets out to unsettle Le Corbusier’s glorified legacy in a way that serves as an occasion to compare the (post-) colonial and nationalist agendas in Algiers and Chandigarh as manifest in their infrastructural and monumental design.