All philosophy, it has been said, may be construed as a footnote to Plato and Aristotle. To many architects and planners, Chandigarh and Brasília have this seminal status with regard to designed capital cities, though both places might delight chiefly the Platonist. In any case, as I have already argued, the genesis of the contemporary designed capital lies in a much earlier era-as early, in fact, as the days of those momentous Greeks. In both Chandigarh and Brasília the acropolitan origins of the capitol complex reemerge. The design of Chandigarh, though only a provincial Indian capital, was a noteworthy attempt to use modern architecture and urbanism to create a capital that symbolized progress and conveyed national identity in a postcolonial context. Brasília, equally notable, constitutes the first time that the abstraction and the social agenda of modernism were applied to the national capital of a major country.