Evidence 89Brunelleschi and Piranesi: these are doubtless fi gures of the
contemporary canon of architectural history, as much as we
can speak of a present-day canon. As such, the evidentiary
and procedural problems they pose are somewhat traditional.
The historians cited above measure and compare artefacts
and determine chronologies and provenance. A third case
allows us to pursue such problems as these, but by introduc-
ing the kind of esoteric materials that resist, as we will see,
the fi rm questions and strong conclusions towards which the
previous examples tend.
Moving now to a twentieth-century subject, equally
canonical, a paper by Antony Moulis shows how an archival
curiosity found in the Fondation Le Corbusier (Paris) muddies
existing, and plausible, explanations of the origins of his plan
for the Punjab capital of Chandigarh.^9 Moulis writes of a
chance meeting in Bogotá, Colombia, between Le Corbusier
and an Australian agronomist named Hugh C. Trumble, in
which the latter described the basic layout and salient fea-
tures of his home town, Adelaide, the colonial capital of
South Australia designed by Colonel William Light in 1836.
Under Trumble’s guidance, it seems, Le Corbusier made a
drawing of the city (dated 19 September 1950).
The facts proven by this drawing are relatively banal,
locating both men in a certain place at a certain time, but
Moulis argues its historical signifi cance on two grounds. The
fi rst is conceptual. Le Corbusier’s drawing of Adelaide shows
how he understood and idealized an unsighted historical city
with eyes conditioned by universalizing modernist planning
concerns: ‘The “Adelaide” produced by Le Corbusier (one
that he pictures back to himself in drawing) is an effi cacious
representation of the architect’s ideology on urbanism –
appearing like a self-fulfi lling prophecy of CIAM [the Congrès
International d’Architecture Moderne] ideals in sketch form.
Indeed it is through the process of “re-drawing” Adelaide
that this ideology achieves what seems a perfect clarity.’^10 Its
second signifi cance is procedural and contextual. The Ade-
laide plan was made only days before Le Corbusier was
commissioned to design the masterplan of Chandigarh and
seven months before that design was resolved. Comparison
of the two cities demonstrates that Le Corbusier’s Adelaide
and Chandigarh have much in common. As diagrams, they