AT PRECISELY 5pm each working day, from 1958 until 1975, Nek Chand, inspector of roads for the Public Works Department of the city of Chandigarh, would climb onto his bicycle. But he did not head for home. Instead he turned north, towards the Shivalik Hills and the damp, mosquito-prickling forest. The road, good at first, soon became a bumpy track and then disappeared completely. Dense brush tangled in his wheels. “There were no roads to come or go,” he remembered. “Who would come here and what for?”
What he went for was to add one more rock, or a few more stones, to the secret world he was building there. The best specimens lay by the Ghaggar river, with strange man-or-woman shapes, and seemed to call out to be rescued. He brought these “individual souls”, at weekends or under cover of darkness, to the space he had cleared with his bare hands in the jungle, and laid them out in patterns in the landscape. A small mud hut, its walls inlaid with perfect fist-sized stones, became his centre of operations.
To the south the great Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier was building a new Chandigarh, a “city beautiful” based on right angles and...
from The Economist: Obituary http://ift.tt/1LxnvK9
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