Chandigarh: Designing Between the Grid and the Embroidery Frame

Chandigarh is the one Indian city that was drawn before it was built. Le Corbusier laid it out as a strict grid of numbered sectors, each one self-contained, each one legible from a map before it existed on the ground. Most cities grow. This one was planned.

A studio inside the grid

IZRA’s studio sits in Sector 17, inside that same rational plan — and the plan doesn’t stay outside the studio door. Every piece starts the way the city did: as a structure, decided first. A silhouette is sketched flat, a pattern is drafted, a toile is cut — all before a single length of Phulkari thread is picked up.

Where the garden grows

What makes Chandigarh more than an exercise in geometry is what was allowed to happen inside the grid — the Rose Garden, the Rock Garden built entirely from cast-off tile and bangles by a road inspector named Nek Chand, Sukhna Lake sitting at the city’s one open, unplanned edge. The structure didn’t crowd out the craft; it gave the craft somewhere to sit.

That’s the closest thing IZRA has to a design philosophy. Decide the grid — the cut, the proportion, the silhouette — with total discipline. Then let the handwork be as unruly, human and slow as it needs to be inside it. A Phulkari yoke that takes nine days on the frame isn’t a contradiction of that structure. It’s what the structure was built to hold.

Why this matters to how a piece is made

It’s also, practically, why sizing and construction are treated with as much care at IZRA as the embroidery is — a beautifully worked Phulkari panel on a badly drafted pattern is still a badly made garment. The city’s lesson was that ornament earns its place only once the structure underneath is right.

Browse the current collection for pieces referenced in this article.