Pierre Jeanneret — c. 1966 · ACL-019
Designed for the Chandigarh project — the Punjab capital laid out by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret from 1951 — this reading table was made in the local government workshops, in teak. The cross-base model, with a removable top screwed onto an X-shaped core, illustrates Jeanneret's functionalist language: raw material, plain construction, economy of means. The stencilled “U.T.” mark (Union Territory, the status Chandigarh acquired in November 1966) indicates an assignment to an administrative building; only institutional furniture was stamped this way. This furniture was the work of a collective studio, led by Jeanneret with young Indian architects — Eulie Chowdhury, Jeet Malhotra, Aditya Prakash; attribution to Jeanneret remains the convention of the catalogues.