Furniture often signifies fond memories and personal statements that adds a character of its own to any setting. We’ve all found ourselves browsing through luxury furniture in architectural digests or brooding over that pricy teak cabinet that would make the perfect addition to our living space. What if we told you that there exists an expensive piece of Indian furniture catching the eyes of the upper echelons all across the globe.
Make way for the Chandigarh chair!
Post Independence, Nehru decided to assign Chandigarh as the face of modern India. Swiss architect Pierre Jeanneret was appointed to map out the futuristic city’s blueprint that would include residential buildings for government bureaucrats, planned roads, and furniture as well.
Jeanneret and a team of architects devised a unique rendition of furniture that would be accessible in libraries, offices, and residential blocks around the city. The Chandigarh Chair was a utilitarian invention that was regarded as the brainchild of Pierre Jeanneret in the 1950’s. The inspiration? The people needed seats.
Decades later, the chair now finds itself to be a luxury statement that finds its place in not so humble abodes of the rich and elite, including the likes of the Kardashians! Designed with the intention of creating humidity and bud-resistant furniture, the teak and cane chair was considered sturdy with its V-shaped legs and fuss-free functionality.
An easy way to recognize the iconic chair is the bridged armchairs and the V-shaped legs that have been associated with a signature Chandigarh design.
At one point the chair that once presided in respectable corners of the city slowly lost its lustre and found itself strewn across the city as people switched to swankier designs. Ruminating in abandoned roofs and neglected museums, the chair lost its worth and began to be sold as scrap.
In an interview, Deepika Gandhi, Director of Le Corbusier centre revealed that “The chairs were produced in bulk as they were allocated in large numbers. In terms of the design language, the chairs represented a practical, functional, and modern approach so they could be created by local artisans easily. The chair represented a modern perspective on architecture being devised in India that became a postcolonial symbol of sorts; making its way into government buildings and houses alike.”
Today, what was once being sold as scraps for a few rupees was catapulted into a prized possession when French dealers began exporting the historic chair across Europe. Cut to the present day, the once discarded junked treasure is now strikingly familiar as refurbished versions hit the auction circuit and adorn celebrity homes.
It’s important to remember that the prestigious chair holds value way beyond its financial worth and represents the modernist narrative it lent to an Indian take on architecture and design.
View the chair here.
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