AUTHENTIC DESIGN ARTEFACTS
We present non-conformist design – rough and unforgiving.
Never accessories. Always resistance.
CATALOGUES
CONTEMPORARY 21. CENTURY
Objects without obedience.
Radical. Unwilling to please.
1STDIBS
YOUTUBE
ARTSY
Pierre Jeanneret Chair: Original Chandigarh Furniture at P! Galerie Zurich
The Vision of Pierre Jeanneret’s Furniture Design for Chandigarh
In 1951, Le Corbusier was commissioned to design Chandigarh as the new capital of Punjab, India. Pierre Jeanneret, his cousin, took the role of chief architect on site and spent 15 years in India, from 1951 to 1965.
While Le Corbusier designed the monumental government buildings of the Capitol Complex, Jeanneret designed, together with B. P. Mathur, the Gandhi Bhawan and other buildings. He developed the furniture programme for the new city: furniture for administrative buildings, universities, residential buildings, the High Court and public institutions.
These interior designs and the furniture were not secondary. They were part of a political and social experiment: a modern, democratic capital in post-colonial India. Each piece had to function: suited to the Indian climate, with local materials, made by local craftsmen, repairable without imported parts.
Jeanneret was not designing objects for a European clientele; he was experimenting with a new language. The challenge was fundamental: How do you translate modernist principles into an Indian context? How do you create furniture that is functional, producible and formally coherent? How do you create objects that are also visionary and develop an Indian modernity of their own? Chandigarh’s design was not an export of European modernism, but its emancipation and further development. It shed the moralism of European modernism: the dogma of the correct form gave way to the Indian reality, which left room for play.
Jeanneret’s answer was a logic of necessity: reduced to structure, material and function. But Pierre Jeanneret did not have a purely functional approach. Here, pragmatism acquired a vision and found its own visual language: design thought architecturally, within a larger context, not as an isolated object decorating space. Design goes beyond design and reaches a state of non-design, where aesthetic, poetic and playful approaches keep a specific nonchalance. This is where his design becomes radical.
The Manufacture of Chandigarh Furniture
Jeanneret worked mostly with local materials such as Indian teak, sissoo and cane; in the early experimental stage, metal and bamboo played a role too. The furniture was built in Chandigarh’s government workshops: traditional joinery, adjustments to available tools, local timber dimensions, local climatic conditions. The cane weaving was done by local craftsmen, often in regional patterns. Later, cane was frequently replaced by plastic straps.
Jeanneret led the Capital Project office on site. Under him worked a team of young Indian architects, among them Eulie Chowdhury, Aditya Prakash, J. L. Malhotra and A. R. Prabhawalkar.
Chandigarh was an entire city, built at once. Thousands of pieces were made for its courts, ministries and colleges, and each had to be assigned to its building. Markings did this work: painted or stencilled abbreviations, often with an inventory number. HC for the High Court, PU for Panjab University, PEC for the Punjab Engineering College. They appear mainly on pieces from administrative buildings, though not on all of them, and rarely on pieces from residential buildings.
The Authenticity of Chandigarh Furniture
After Jeanneret’s death in 1967, the furniture was considered outdated. Many pieces were discarded: sold, given away, burned. Collectors took an interest in the late 1990s; when prices soared, fakes and then reproductions appeared too. Since then, authenticity has been the central question, not only for reasons of value, but because an original possesses an aura.
A Pierre Jeanneret chair was usually in daily use for decades, in a court, a ministry or a college. The surfaces show it: worn edges, faded inventory marks, old repairs. This patina is part of the object’s appearance and defines its unique character. It documents its history and is ultimately one of the more reliable indications that a piece is authentic. It should therefore be conserved, not removed. Inappropriate repairs, unsuitable varnish, or sanding make these traces vanish. Interventions should be limited to what stability requires. Where that limit lies must be judged piece by piece.
The provenance of most pieces cannot be traced without gaps. Receipts from public auctions or any other written documentation rarely exist, and where they do, they cannot be linked with certainty to a specific piece. This is where the gallery’s experience is essential. A certificate registered on a blockchain records the condition and ownership of a piece at a given moment. From that point on, its history is documented.
P! Galerie
P! Galerie in Dietikon near Zurich, led by the architect Pedja Hadži-Manović, deals in authentic Chandigarh furniture by Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier: the Office Cane Chair PJ-SI-28-B, the Bridge Armchair LC/PJ-SI-42-A, the Clerk’s Desk PJ-BU-02-A and the file rack PJ-R-27-A. It shows Jeanneret alongside related positions: Charlotte Perriand, Gerrit Rietveld, Jean Prouvé and Tom Strala. The selection follows one criterion: radical, not decorative.