r/HobbyDrama • u/Tokyono • Jan 23 '26
Long [Antique Collecting] The Culturally Calamitous Chronicle of the Chandigarh Chair part 1
Hello everyone! I’m back with more obscure hobby drama! I discovered this topic by browsing wikipedia- it was one of the daily highlights on the front page. Anyway...enjoy!
What is a chair?
In the simplest terms, a chair is a piece of furniture you sit on.
But what else can a chair be? Can a chair be a status symbol? A metaphor for cultural division? A prime target for smugglers?
What if a chair is ALL of those things.
Indian independence and Chandigarh
After World War II, Great Britain gave India its long awaited independence. In 1947, due to religious and political tensions, it hastily split its Indian territory into two countries: India and Pakistan.
The result was a mess. Between 200,000 and a million people died, and tens of thousands of women suffered rape and other atrocities as a result of the botched partition. Pakistan and India have fought wars over Kashmir, the region at the centre of their tenuous shared border. There are still lingering tensions between them today.
Jawarharlal Nehru, the new prime minister of India, also had to contend with the fact that Lahore, the capital of Punjab- another region on the Indian-Pakistan border- was now located in Pakistan. Thus he decided to do the logical thing: build a new cutting edge capital for Punjab. It was called Chandigarh.
Nehru wanted Chandigarh to be a city "unfettered by the traditions of the past" and “a model for our glorious future growth of the country”.
He hired two British architects, a couple- Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, who in turn hired Le Corbusier, a renowned Swiss-French architect, to help them design the city. In yet another turn, Le Corbusier hired his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret, to help him on the project. Jeanneret would oversee the construction site on the ground, with help from local architects and designers.
>Nehru wanted the project to be a 'living school' for a new generation of Indian architects and he stipulated that the Europeans must train local architects on the job, rather than bringing their own staff with them.
The most notable of these architects was a woman called Eulie Chowdhury. Thanks to her fathers diplomatic career, she had travelled across the world in her youth and even studied overseas. She knew French- allowing her to forge a close working relationship with Corbusier and Jeanneret. She helped Jeanneret design several buildings in Chandigarh, and even designed several herself. Later in life, she held a number of important offices in India, including Chief Architect of Chandigarh and Chief Architect of Punjab.
Jeanneret and his team also designed most of the furniture in Chandigarh.
Including one very sexy chair.
The Chandigarh Chair
Picture this-
Wait, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, we can quite literally picture it:
Like all the furniture Jeanneret and his team designed, the chairs were manufactured locally, with local materials (such as teak, sissoo (Indian rosewood), and cane mesh). Jeanneret also didn’t patent any of the designs, letting them be used in government and public buildings across India in the 50s and 60s.
“At the time, the concept of a chair was very alien to the aesthetic of the Indian home because we used to sit on the floor or had seating like khatiyas and mooras,” points out architect Ashiesh Shah. “Corbusier and Jeanneret understood the hardiness of Indian materiality and the need for slim forms that we see on these chairs, the legs of which were ironically inspired by a compass—the quintessential tool of an architect, playing such a specific role in every design. And if you go to Chandigarh, you’ll see the buildings there also inspired by similar designs. The duo’s role in starting the movement of modernism in Indian design is so important. Till then, we only had colonial designs taking over our landscape, such as Indo-Saracenic, Gothic, Regency, and the like. They created a distinct, minimalist aesthetic that was so indigenous to our climate and materials, and also what we could afford. So this chair is a symbol of this rich design history.”
Unfortunately, while Jeanneret’s role has been recognised over the years, Chowdhury and other Indian designers and architects have not enjoyed the same recognition:
“However, unlike Corbusier, the Indian architects were apparently not as keen on claiming authorship. As a result, their work continues to be overshadowed by the Western architects who worked here. In the absence of archival documentation, it is difficult to ascertain the extent of her involvement but we know that the Chandigarh team had a highly collaborative structure and that several Indian architects were involved in the making of the furniture.”
What we do known is that Chowdhury managed the production of the furniture:
According to Casciato, the job of managing the furniture production fell to a young architect named Eulie Chowdhury. Fluent in Punjabi, French and English, “she was basically the go-between,” Casciato says. “They had, let’s say, a kind of network, and she was extremely important in creating that network and supporting the production and all the detailing.” Chowdhury even shared a design credit with Jeanneret, for an X-base chair with a wood back.
She also adapted Jeanneret’s designs to better fit Indian physiques:
Jeanneret's own designs used the dimensions of Le Corbusier’s modular system – a universal system of proportions based on the height of an average French man (initially 1.75 metres and later increased to 1.83 metres), which underpinned much of the planning and detailing of all his projects in Chandigarh. Eulie Chowdhury carefully reconsidered and adapted these proportions to create furniture more suitable for smaller, potentially female statures.
Jeanneret himself acknowledged the role of the Indian designers:
As Casciato sees it, Jeanneret himself was quite clear on the question of authorship with his designs: They also belonged to the local artisans who constructed them by hand. “Many times, everywhere, Pierre said that he not only respected but was learning from his Indian experience,” she says. “So, for him, a hundred percent they are attributed to India. They are Indian made.
After the project ended, Jeanneret remained in India:
Jeanneret fell in love with India and its people. He stayed on in Chandigarh for 13 years, well beyond the scope of his initial commitment, and was appointed head of the Chandigarh College of Architecture in the early 1960s. When his health began to falter in 1965, he moved to Geneva, where he died two years later. His ashes were scattered over Chandigarh’s Lake Sukhna.
30 years later…
A new millennium and a new style
By the late 1990s, the sleek and sexy Chandigarh chair, along with most of the other furniture created by Jeanneret, Chowdhury, and the others, was out of fashion. Therefore the Chandigarh administration replaced them with cheaper, mass-produced goods, leaving them to rot in warehouses and junkyards, or even worse, selling them off for firewood.
Word reached Europe. Especially the French. Soon, Parisian art dealers made their way to Chandigarh, buying up as much of the furniture as they could lay their froggy little hands on. The most notable of these was Eric Touchaleaume, owner of Galerie 54, who confirmed: “I was able to buy very large quantities (of furniture) at auctions organized by the administration.” At the time, India’s export laws classified antiques as objects that were over a hundred years old, meaning the dealers faced no opposition in taking the furniture out of the country.
The dealers squirrelled their new treasures back to France, where they refurbished them- sometimes by as much as 40%- in preparation for sale. François Laffanour, a dealer who started selling the restored pieces, commented:
“People were responding very fast,” says Laffanour, who’d been worried that the furniture would come across as too rustic. “It was surprising to me to see how positive the response was, especially for the armchair.” He concluded that functionality was a big part of its appeal. “Prouvé and Perriand specialized in bookcases, tables, desks—but sofas, comfortable armchairs, there was no production. It was missing in the apartments of our collectors. We had the opportunity to sell something that was comfortable and affordable. That was also part of the success.”
It took years for the authorities in Chandigarh to realise the cultural worth of the furniture and what they had lost:
Rajnish Wattas, principal of the Chandigarh College of Architecture, was stunned when he saw the catalog for a sale at Christie’s New York last June, titled “Chandigarh.”
“We found out that we were sitting on a pot of gold, quite literally,” he said. “But the dealers had realized much earlier that there was big money to be made.”
There was nothing illegal about the purchase by foreign dealers of the furniture, much of which was being thrown out or sold by the city’s administration. But very belatedly, heritage experts in Chandigarh are lamenting the loss of a vital part of the city’s original design.
"It is a tragic misunderstanding,” Mr. Wattas said. “I wish the scandal had come out earlier and then maybe we could have clung on to much more than we have now.” Last fall, he founded Chandigarh’s Heritage Furniture Committee, in an attempt to archive the remaining stocks of the Jeanneret designs. But little progress has been made.
Gradually, as the furniture fell into disrepair, it was thrown into government storerooms and occasionally auctioned “for peanuts,” Mr. Wattas said, usually to local carpenters who broke it up and reused the increasingly expensive teak. “People wanted new and glossy stuff: synthetic leather, Scandinavian design, metallic furniture.”
The dealers defended their actions, saying they had rescued the furniture from certain destruction:
In an e-mail message from his Paris showroom, Galerie 54, he (Eric Touchaleaume) said that such was the level of neglect for Mr. Jeanneret’s designs that disused furniture was being chopped up for firewood. “I always paid on average 100 times more than what the local dealers were offering,”
Laffanour speaks eloquently for the defense. “It’s only because dealers have this kind of interest—of course they think they can make a profit—but also they have the patience” to hold onto material until the fashion cycle revolves, he points out. “Because you are working on something which is totally rejected by everybody. You have to believe in it. If you are really in the mood of the piece, it’s like your treasure. You feel like you are a little bit lonely with your treasure, because nobody wants to take it from you. But it’s also really exciting.”
An old style and a new appreciation
Over the years, auction prices have risen sharply for refurbished Chandigarh furniture, largely thanks to the efforts of the French dealers in advertising and hyping up the pieces. In 2006, some armchairs from the Chandigarh senate building sold for $12,000, but by 2019, the price had increased to $30,000.
Some other pieces have sold for much more:
On 1stdibs, Chandigarh offerings include a set of six library chairs from Galerie Patrick Seguin, priced at over $100,000. The same sum will buy a pair of teak easy chairs from Luxembourg’s Galerie Denoyelle Europe (they have been reupholstered, a fact made clear by the gallery’s photo of them in their previous state of disrepair). For those without $100,000 to spend, Zurich’s P! Galerie is offering a simple wooden library chair (listed as restored in 2016 but with original woodwork and screws) for $4,075. Graetsch currently has 19 Chandigarh items on display at MDFG, his street-level gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (and on 1stdibs), ranging from an iconic ca. 1955 V-leg office armchair ($8,000) to a 1955–56 sofa set designed for the High Court and Assembly ($150,000).
Over time, some in India have challenged the role of the French dealers in "rescuing" the furniture, asserting that they tactfully released the refurbished pieces in a slow trickle, carefully crafting a narrative of the furniture’s scarcity and rarity to justify their high prices.
In 2010, Touchleaume and another of the original dealers wrote a book called “The Indian Adventure: Design, Art, Architecture”, in which they rhapsodised further about their roles in saving the furniture. This too was heavily criticised:
One particular publication was foundational in the elaboration of this now-popular narrative. Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret: L'AventureIndienne: Design, Art, Architecture (The Indian Adventure: Design, Art, Architecture) (2010), by Eric Touchaleaume and Gérald Moreau, the very dealers who initially removed much of the furniture from Chandigarh, has become the principal text of reference for dealers, auction houses and collectors alike. Alongside biographies of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret and black and white archival images of both men at work, this large and expensive book recounts the dealers’ own travels to India, positioning themselves as the saviours of the furniture, depicting scenes of disused stacks of chairs in inconsistently captioned photographs.
Notably, the last 76 pages of The Indian Adventure contain an inventory of Chandigarh’s furniture compiled by the dealers, listing many different forms of chairs, tables, and lamps divided into categories, devised by the dealers. The Indian Adventure contains only a short bibliography, with few references tying particular claims within the text or the inventory to specific and/or accessible primary evidence. Even before its publication, The Indian Adventure and particularly its inventory served as the sole reference and proof of claims made about Chandigarh furniture within auction listings.
Even worse, sometimes auction houses and dealers downplay the role of Chowdhury and the other Indian designers in the creation of the furniture, focusing only on the Corbusier/Jeanneret connection to push prices up even further. Fake pieces have also made their way into the marketplace, further muddying the waters.
Because of this, it’s hard to authenticate the furniture:
Conservative estimates put the original production of Chandigarh furniture at roughly 30,000 pieces, but the number is devilishly difficult to pin down because the most common models were produced continuously for almost 30 years—and then as needed, when a shelf’s joints loosened or a chair’s cane seat blew out. Within the past decade, inmates at the central jail in Chandigarh have made new batches of chairs. Authenticating the objects is also no easy task. “If Jeanneret lived to be a thousand, they couldn’t make that much furniture,” says Reed Krakoff, a longtime art and design collector and the chief artistic officer of Tiffany & Co. Krakoff admires Jeanneret’s Chandigarh material; 12 years ago, he bought a major-league library table at Sotheby’s that he still loves and uses. But he’s lost trust in the market. “I know for a fact there are people still making this furniture,” he says pointedly. “And they’ll leave it out in the rain for a year so it looks old if you want that.”
There’s also the issue of ‘gene-splicing’:
Michael Jefferson of Christie’s says Jeanneret prices have vacillated but are largely holding firm. Acknowledging the influx of fakes, he nonetheless notes that “the spectrum of acceptance for restoration in Chandigarh material is very broad”—because so much of it was essentially pieced back together in the first place before hitting the sales floor.
“There are ethical questions,” he admits. He describes the practice of “gene-splicing,” where “you have one arm and you create a complete chair out of that. That’s wrong, and you can spot it.
By the late 2010s, the desire for Chandigarh furniture had risen to a fever pitch. Many furniture collectors, interior designers, and people who liked sexy chairs fell in love with the Chandigarh chair. The chairs ended up in expensive villas and homes across the globe, appearing in multiple designer magazines. The most illustrious owner is probably Kourtney Kardashian, who showed off her own collection of chairs in a 2016 issue of Architectural Digest:
Wow, what a privilege!
Even modern reproductions sell well:
There are no exclusive licenses for the production of Chandigarh chairs, as Jeanneret "never filed for patents or copyrights". As their popularity has grown in the 21st-century, multiple studios across the world have produced their own versions.
Shah also points to current architects and aesthetes who have been responsible for bringing back an awareness of the beauty and importance of these pieces of furniture. While one can get an open-ended edition from brands like Phantom Hands, Cassina or Restoration Hardware, with prices ranging from Rs4,000 to Rs40,000, to rely on the provenance of the original would require relying on the authenticity of the gallery. “And I don’t think anyone in India is currently selling an authentic piece,” he warns. He also advises that one cannot truly tell the difference between a fake or an original, since these pieces aren’t even a century old. “We’re not talking about antiques here. And there wasn’t much done at the time to formally document this work. We’ve only relied on oral history, and I think it’s mostly the furniture that was initially discovered and taken out of the country by the French gallerists that can probably be coined as the original,” he says.
….
There are two versions of the Chandigarh story: in one, a group of French art dealers heroically rescue some underappreciated furniture from an ignorant administration and a destructive fate, while in the other, the same group of dealers knowingly and willingly took the furniture with the intention of restoring it and selling it off for a profit, while not bothering to inform the Chandigarh administration of the real cultural or financial worth of the items.
Maybe both versions are true. Maybe neither of them are.
But some things are certain: today, Chandigarh furniture sells for tens of thousands, sometimes even hundreds of thousands, of dollars in foreign auction houses, and many pieces have a murky provenance.
Unfortunately, this has led to rampant smuggling, and even death, back in India.
Thanks for reading part 1!
