ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the symbolism of the Capitol buildings individually and of their collective the spatial dynamics, paying particular attention to the “leakage” of space that seems to be an integral part of Le Corbusier’s careful choreographed relationship of the big governmental buildings and their surrounding site. Via comparison with the self-assured presentation of Edwin Lutyens’ and Herbert Baker’s imperial New Delhi, it argues that Le Corbusier’s response to the Nehruvian nation-state was to put into play a series of ideas that supplemented, and at times contested, the idealistic aspirations of democracy as a representative practice. These included the necessity of personal reflection as embodied in the walking path of the Capitol Promenade, the cultivation of uncertainty as embodied in the diffident forms of the High Court and the Governor’s Palace, and the investment in the sense of the sacred, as in the inverted parasol motif. The chapter concludes with a reading of the Secretariat as the embodiment of the most vivid manifestation of Indian democracy, its infinite bureaucracy.
