Grass Between The Stones
A double-sided map of my hometown, Chandigarh—India’s first modern city, designed by Le Corbusier after Partition. The project explores the tension between its low-context, modernist planning and the high-context culture of the people who live there.
This was a deeply personal piece. I spent a lot of time researching the political history, architecture, and planning principles that shaped the city—but what made it most meaningful was speaking with my parents, who were both born and raised there.
Chandigarh is a relatively young city, almost the same age as my parents, and their stories revealed how the city has grown and shifted over time, beyond its original utopian ideals.
At some point, the project turned into a bit of a rant about a chair—designed for Chandigarh, later auctioned off in the West for thousands, completely removed from its context and sold back as a luxury object. One section of the map is devoted entirely to that story, as a reflection on erasure and appropriation.
The reverse side of the piece features the city’s layout—a rigid grid where every intersection is a roundabout, built on principles of order, logic, and Western urban planning. But what interests me more is how people actually live in it: how they personalize, adapt, and disrupt a system never made for them in the first place.