Constructed as a new capital for the post-partition Indian Punjab, the city of Chandigarh is known for its Le Corbusier designed city plan and Capitol Complex. More recently, Chandigarh’s fame has also extended to the modernist furniture produced for the city’s municipal buildings, courthouse, colleges and a select few private homes. Today these pieces are sold as the work of Swiss/French designer Pierre Jeanneret, and can be found taking top billing at auction, in the collections of several international museums, and in the homes of the rich and famous.

As such, these pieces of modernist design have taken on a new, second life in Western Europe and North America, almost entirely indistinguishable from their origins and use within Chandigarh. As they have been removed, refurbished, and re-sold at Christies, Sotheby’s, Wright, Artcurial and through countless private dealers and sales, these now iconic pieces have transformed from Chandigarh chairs to Jeanneret chairs, from utilitarian furniture to pieces of high design.

This paper problematizes the narrative and use of Chandigarh Chairs as it has been popularized outside of India, suggesting that the trajectory of these chairs through the antiques market perpetuates systematic colonial, imperialist, and extractive tendencies and systems.

Further, this paper outlines an all-too-common trajectory of systematic and methodological extraction of materials and items moving from the global south to the global north, and complicates the notion of ‘Second Hand Cultures’ by raising global ethical questions regarding the repair, re-sale, and re-use of Chandigarh’s modernist furniture