Sectors. Chandigarh, read room by room Open in the atlas

Sector 10 · landmark

Government Museum & Art Gallery

A museum designed to grow outward forever, holding a collection that exists because of Partition.

Where it sits in the city
This room’s memory is still to be written. Any owner memory of the museum or the Sector 10 culture complex.

Then & now

Then
Designed 1960-62, built to 1967, inaugurated 1968.
Who
Le Corbusier with M.N. Sharma, Pierre Jeanneret and S.D. Sharma.
Before
Built new, anchoring the city’s museum-and-culture sector.

The OG move

It realises Le Corbusier’s 1931 idea of a “Museum of Unlimited Growth,” a square spiral meant to keep expanding outward; it is one of only three museums he built anywhere (the others in Ahmedabad and Tokyo). The Sector 10 complex also holds the Natural History and City museums, and the Chandigarh Carnival fills the Leisure Valley out front each November.

A fact that reframes it

Its roughly 600 Gandhara sculptures are India’s share of the old Lahore Museum, split with Pakistan on Partition in 1948, the second-largest Gandhara holding in the country.

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Sources (2)
  1. Designed by Le Corbusier (with M.N. Sharma, Jeanneret, S.D. Sharma); inaugurated 1968; a "Museum of Unlimited Growth"
    chdmuseum.gov.in/home/about; c20society.org.uk (building of the month)
  2. ~627 Gandhara sculptures = India’s 1948 Partition share of the Lahore Museum; 2nd-largest Gandhara holding in India
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Museum_and_Art_Gallery,_Chandigarh