These Pierre Jeanneret “Vchairs” were restored by jail inmates in Chandigarh, India. The valuable chairs have often been discarded.

By AMELIA GENTLEMAN

CHANDIGARH, India - Every working day for the past 20 years, Suresh Kanwar, a civil engineer in Chandigarh’s Forestry Department, has been sitting on the same battered wooden chair, an object he said had “no beauty” even if it was,“for office use, very comfortable.
Hazarding a guess as to its value, he suggested 400 rupees, or about $10, “perhaps, at a junkyard.”
A pair of chairs identical to Mr. Kanwar’s, recognizable to collectors as Pierre Jeanneret teak “V-chairs,” went on sale at the auction house Christie’s in New York with a reserve of $8,000 to $12,000.
A handful of antique dealers from around the world have become regular visitors to government junkyards in Chandigarh, the experimental modernist city about 240 kilometers north of New Delhi, conceived by the architect Le Corbusier in the 1950s. There they buy disused stocks of furniture that was created by Corbusier’s colleagues to equip the new city.
The disappearance of large quantities of these distinctive, ultrafunctional tables and chairs - most of them designed by Mr.
Jeanneret, Le Corbusier’s cousin, for the city’s government offices, courtrooms and colleges - has begun to alarm architects and some officials in the city.
Rajnish Wattas, principal of the Chandigarh College of Architecture, was stunned when he saw the catalog for a sale at Christie’s New York last June, titled “Chandigarh.”
“We found out that we were sitting on a pot of gold, quite literally,” he said. “But the dealers had realized much earlier that there was big money to be made.
There was nothing illegal about the purchase by foreign dealers of the furniture . But very belatedly, heritage experts in Chandigarh are lamenting the loss of a vital part of the city’s original design.
“It is a tragic misunderstanding,” Mr. Wattas said. “I wish the scandal had come out earlier and then maybe we could have clung on to much more than we have now.” Last fall, he founded Chandigarh’s Heritage Furniture Committee, in an attempt to archive the remaining stocks of the Jeanneret designs. But little progress has been made.
Mr. Jeanneret, who later took over from his cousin as Chandigarh’s chief architect, was passionate about creating furniture that echoed the style and ethos of the surrounding buildings.
“There were no furniture shops, no carpet shops, so the architects designed their own,” said M. N. Sharma, an architect who worked closely with Le Corbusier.
Few of the city’s employees gave the furniture a second glance.
Gradually, as the furniture fell into disrepair, it was thrown into government storerooms and occasionally auctioned for nothing, Mr.
Wattas said, usually to local carpenters who broke it up and reused the increasingly expensive teak.
India’s export laws classify antiques as objects more than 100 years old, which made it easy for collectors to take the objects out of the country.
“It’s not the collectors that were the problem,” said Kiran Joshi, a professor of architecture at the Chandigarh College of Architecture. “The problem is our perception of heritage. We thought it was junk; our government thought it was junk.”