Chandigarh was built as a planned city in the aftermath of Indian Independence in 1947 and the partition of the Punjab which left the former capital, Lahore, in Pakistan and the remaining Indian Punjab without a main city. Le Corbusier was commissioned to design the new city and construction began in the 1950s. The city is constructed on a grid plan with numbered sectors. There are three major Le Corbuser buildings in the administrative centre in the northern part of the city in sector 1: the Secretariat; the Assembly and the High Court (GoogleMaps satellite view).

Although considered a success by some - it is certainly a unique urban project in India - Le Corbusier's designs have been criticised as an imposition of European modernist urban planning on a country in which circumstances and concerns were very substantially different. For example Chandigarh's grid plan and wide roads were designed to be traversed by car and this at a time when private ownership of cars in India was (and still is) very limited.