The Open Hand is Chandigarh's emblem, a 26-metre sheet-metal sculpture by Le Corbusier set on a slow-turning pivot at the edge of the Capitol Complex. The hand is the city's official symbol and one of the few Corbusian monuments anywhere designed to move.
You see it from a kilometre away across the plaza, rising on a concrete pylon out of a sunken trench Le Corbusier called the "Pit of Consideration." The setting is austere — bare paving, low concrete benches, the Shivalik Hills rising behind — and the sculpture itself rotates with the breeze, a deliberately strange object dropped into a deliberately empty space. It works best at dawn or late afternoon when the light raked across the concrete makes the geometry legible.