The city of Chandigarh, India, is famous worldwide for its rock garden. But before there was a garden, there was a man with a secret passion for art.
The Rock Garden of Chandigarh is 25 acres of artistic magic. Home to 2,000 statues and welcoming more than 5,000 visitors per day annually, the outdoor museum is a striking combination of masterful architecture and landscaping, complete with courtyards, waterfalls, clearings and a fairy tale of sculptural creatures.
However, this wonderland of creativity could have just as easily never been, for its founder actually started the project completely in secret.
In the 1950s, while working as a roads inspector for Le Corbusier’s construction of Chandigarh as the new capital of Punjab, Nek Chand cleared a small patch of jungle in the North Indian city. He soon began to cultivate a humble garden, cordoning the area off with stones and eventually using found materials including discarded homeware and recyclables to create sculptures with which to animate the space.
Every evening after working a full day, Chand would toil through the night entirely alone to make and place the statues and to clear more land on which for them to live. It was illegal for him to be cutting down the forest at all, much less to be transforming it into an art installation, so he told no one about the project.