Bhakra Dam

The "Bhakra Dam" is bigger than a single structure: it originally combined a dam holding back a reservoir of over 100 km², meant to irrigate part of the Punjab, with two power stations and staff housing. In 1955 Le Corbusier was brought in as consultant architect on this Himachal Pradesh site, 100 kilometres north of Chandigarh, where work had been under way since 1948; it was P. L. Varma, the Punjab's chief engineer, who asked him to take part.

On 17 November 1955 Nehru made a second request: to crown the work with a monument honouring the many labourers on the site, some of whom lost their lives there. The architect saw a chance to tackle a kind of structure he had already discussed with interest in 1920s writings such as Urbanisme and the Almanach d'architecture moderne.

The dam was inaugurated on 20 October 1963 without him; he regretted that he had not been invited.

Le Corbusier put forward several additions: a monument crowning the dam; a promenade footbridge from which visitors would have enjoyed an exceptional view of it; and an Open Hand, like the one Chandigarh was to have in its Depth of Consideration, joining the crest to the water and the sky. At its most ambitious the scheme even took in a hotel, a museum, a cafeteria, a tourist centre and a sports club. The Indian administration adopted none of these ideas.

From 1958 he also studied a way of approaching the dam that would keep the landscape in harmony, and again met resistance: from the engineers, who felt stripped of their work, then from officials discouraged by the extra cost. The structure itself is a concrete gravity dam 225.55 m high, built across the Sutlej near the village of Bhakra in Bilaspur district.

The dam holds back the Gobind Sagar reservoir. With the Nangal dam downstream, it makes up the Bhakra–Nangal Project, which plays a vital part in irrigation, hydroelectric generation and flood control. The dam is still in operation.

Designated viewing points let visitors take in the scale of the structure.