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The Continuum of the Leaf Plan: Mathew Nowicki’s Humanist Urbanism in Chandigarh
Lecture
Friday, 20 March 2026, 5.00 p
As part of the opening weekend of the exhibition Humanist Modernism. Maciej and Stanisława Nowiccy, the Museum of Architecture invites you to a lecture by Prof. Sangeeta Bagga Mehta from the Chandigarh College of Architecture (India).
The lecture will explore Mathew Nowicki’s Leaf Plan (1950), an unbuilt urban proposal for the new capital of Punjab, Chandigarh. Nowicki envisioned the city as an organic system inspired by the structure of a leaf, with a central spine, branching circulation routes and interconnected neighbourhood units responding to landscape, climate and human activity.
After Nowicki’s tragic death in August 1950, a new team of designers took over the planning of Chandigarh. Although the city was eventually realised under the leadership of Le Corbusier, the intellectual legacy of the Leaf Plan continued to shape its development. In the work of Pierre Jeanneret, Le Corbusier’s close collaborator in Chandigarh, one can trace the palimpsest of Nowicki’s ideas: the biological metaphor of the city, attention to climate and landscape, and an emphasis on socially cohesive neighbourhoods. The lecture will unpack the conceptual richness of the Leaf Plan and discuss its enduring relevance within the spatial structure of Chandigarh, even within the dominant grid associated with Le Corbusier’s design.
Biogram:
Dr Sangeeta Bagga Mehta is Professor and the first woman Principal of the Chandigarh College of Architecture. An urban designer and scholar of modern architectural heritage, her research focuses on the urban landscape of Chandigarh, environmental design and the conservation of twentieth-century architecture
