Review: <i>How Architects, Experts, Politicians, International Agencies, and Citizens Negotiate Modern Planning: Casablanca Chandigarh</i>

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How Architects, Experts, Politicians, International Agencies, and Citizens Negotiate Modern Planning: Casablanca Chandigarh&lt;/strong&gt; Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture Montreal, Quebec 26 November 2013–20 April 2014&lt;/p&gt;\n&lt;p class="p1"&gt;Two plywood partitions snaked across the back room of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA)’s exhibition on Casablanca and Chandigarh during the fall and winter of 2013–14. The mounted reproductions of planning grids first displayed at CIAM (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne) IX, Aix-en-Provence (1953), exemplified an innovative approach to exhibition design by the Tokyo-based firm Atelier Bow-Wow and cocurators Tom Avermaete and Maristella Casciato. Openness to multiple modes of display—photographs, models, original drawings, film, information graphics, and facsimiles—conveyed a desire to engage with the complexities of modern planning during a period of decolonization. &lt;/p&gt;\n&lt;p class="p1"&gt;The exhibition was organized around three themes: exploring, planning, and designing the civic fabric. The projects for Casablanca, a planned development of the ancient Moroccan city’s periphery, and Chandigarh, a new capital city for the postpartition state of Punjab, India, mirrored each other along a vertical axis centered on the “Transnationalism”–themed room, with both projects converging in the back room with its undulating partitions. There, the focus was on the historical moment when their respective grids were displayed at CIAM IX, which led to intense debates and contributed to the subsequent dissolution of CIAM. This rhetorical move encouraged visitors to compare and contrast the planning techniques led by Michel Écochard (Casablanca) and Le Corbusier (Chandigarh). There, and in other sections of the exhibit, similar quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis such as survey, sketching, and photographs were displayed for both projects. Despite these efforts at clear comparability, the question of how similar or different these two developments were remains an open one. The gallery texts and archival material suggested less easily quantifiable tendencies toward sociology (at Casablanca) and poetics (at Chandigarh)&lt;/p&gt;

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.