An exhibit on Aditya Prakash in his own home

Staged within Aditya Prakash’s house in Chandigarh, Double Framed uses layered photographs and archival fragments to examine memory, photography and the afterlife of modernist architecture

13 Mar 2026

Namrata Dewanjee

Memory, as attested by Freud, does not have a predilection to recount the past exactly as it happened. In our attempts to archive it, therefore, we store it in a photograph, going so far as to relate the two in the highest honour we can bestow: photographic memory. Call it hubris or naïveté, but objectivity eludes them both. This uneasy relationship between recollection and representation animates Double Framed, an exhibition situated within the house designed by architect Aditya Prakash in Chandigarh. For his son, architect, architectural historian and educator Vikramaditya Prakash, the project becomes a meditation on memory and modern life. Growing up in Chandigarh during the 1960s meant witnessing the unfolding of one of modern architecture’s most ambitious experiments. Architects from across India and the world arrived to contribute to the new capital of Punjab under the direction of Le Corbusier.

Aditya Prakash had returned to India in the 1950s to participate in this unprecedented project. Vikramaditya recalls that his father would often tell students: “I learnt everything I did from Le Corbusier — even if it was in going against everything he stood for.” Prakash’s voice reverberates across the architectural landscape of Chandigarh, yet it acquires a more intimate register within the house he designed for his own family. Until March 15, that house becomes the site of Double Framed, an exhibition exploring the dualities embedded within the architect’s life and work. After the passing of his parents, Vikramaditya and his family made the difficult decision to sell the house. “We were able to do so only because it was being taken on by Eashan Chaufla, who is also an architect and someone deeply attuned to Chandigarh’s modernist inheritance. That made possible not an ending, but a continuity,” he explains. “The exhibition grew out of conversations between Eashan and me about what it means for one person to have grown up in a house and another to inhabit it now. The house was full of residue — of memory, of family life, of architectural intention, and of my father’s wider world of theater, photography and design.”

“The house is a remarkably intact example of Chandigarh’s lived modernism, not the monumental Chandigarh of tourist photographs, but the intimate Chandigarh of domestic space, climate, furniture, proportion and everyday ritual”

Vikramaditya Prakash

CAMERA LUCIDA

That wider world unfolds through a series of layered photographic compositions. Images of domestic life in the Prakash household are superimposed with scenes from Abhinet, Aditya Prakash’s theatre troupe. The result is a choreography of temporal overlap. As Eashan observes, “The element of staging, whether in the house images or the theater images, creates an uncanny relationship between them.” These photographic plates are housed in light boxes constructed from recycled wood frames from a 2011 exhibition of Prakash’s work at the Chandigarh College of Architecture. “By placing them in the same illuminated frame, we tried to materialize the way memory actually works: not linearly, but through superimposition, association, recurrence and surprise, just as Freud describes in Civilization and its Discontents,” explains Vikramaditya.

The exhibition’s title also references the two cameras through which Aditya Prakash practiced photography—the Rolleiflex TLR and the Argus C3. In Camera Lucida, Barthes famously describes photography as a “temporal hallucination, false on the level of perception, true on the level of time.” The exhibition stages precisely such a hallucination. By juxtaposing images from different moments, the lightboxes produce a fragile dialogue between past and present. Yet the aim is not documentary fidelity. The exhibition does not attempt to reconstruct an authoritative version of events; instead, it shifts emphasis from verity to possibility. “A photograph gives us presence, but only in the form of absence,” Vikramaditya reflects. “It shows us something that is no longer there, while insisting on its continuing life.” He continues: “Lived memory is less stable, less linear and far more associative.” It returns in fragments… often triggered by space, light, texture, or mood rather than chronology. So, while photography may appear to preserve memory, it also remakes it… and jogs the past into a living present. By interpretation it also anticipates a future.”

LIVING HISTORY

Within the house, the lightboxes are placed almost furtively among the objects of everyday life. Adjacent to furniture, corridors, and domestic routines, the glowing frames resemble small portals — television-like apparitions capable of transporting the viewer across temporal planes. For Vikramaditya and Eashan, whose practice move fluidly between architecture, furniture, art and curation, the project represents a long-imagined collaboration centred on the house itself. The studio and gallery space constructed as an extension of the residence holds the exhibition while also suggesting future possibilities for the building. Living here, Eashan explains, “comes with freedom and a responsibility of inheriting and critiquing the modernist ethos.”

His engagement with Prakash’s work began after returning to Chandigarh from architecture school at the Rhode Island School of Design. Invited by Vikramaditya to help document and organise the Aditya Prakash archive for the book One Continuous Line, he gradually entered into a deeper relationship with the house. The significance of this change of hands lies in the recognition that architecture inevitably outlives its first inhabitants. Buildings survive the biographies that produced them. As Vikramaditya notes, the movement from one inhabitant to another “suggests that architectural legacy is not something frozen in time. It survives through reinterpretation, care and renewed use.”

REMEMBERING ADITYA PRAKASH

For Eashan, Prakash’s work belongs to a moment when architecture operated within an expansive cultural horizon. “His work existed in a socio-cultural-political milieu that was unapologetically utopian, something that is markedly absent from current discourses around cities in India and elsewhere.” To inhabit the house today is therefore an encounter the residue of that moment, a period when architecture in India was bound to the imagination of a newly independent nation.

“The house is a remarkably intact example of Chandigarh’s lived modernism, not the monumental Chandigarh of tourist photographs, but the intimate Chandigarh of domestic space, climate, furniture, proportion and everyday ritual,” adds Vikramaditya. If Corbusier’s Chandigarh announced itself through the grand symbolism of the Capitol, Aditya Prakash’s house reveals how those ideas entered daily life. Modernism is translated here from monument to dwelling, from the scale of the state to the scale of habit.

Seen in this light, the AP House forms a counterpoint to Corbusier’s monumental vision. He, alongside the Indian architects who practiced alongside him, made modernism an irrevocably Indian endeavour. What does the house stand for today? Vikramaditya observes, “At a time when architecture is often caught between spectacle on the one hand and real-estate logic on the other, it is worth returning to a generation that thought of design as a civilizational and ethical project.”

Read more: City beautiful, city perfect:
Discover the story of Chandigarh beyond Corbusier’s ideal utopia