Rock Garden

Waterfall at Rock Garden

Rock Garden is a sculpture garden in Chandigarh, India, also known as Nek Chand's Rock Garden, after its founder, Nek Chand, a government official who started the garden secretly in his spare time in 1957. Today it is spread over an area of forty-acre (160,000 m²), it is completely built of industrial & home waste and thrown-away items

Background

The garden is most famous for its sculptures made from recycled ceramic
The Rock Garden project was secretly initiated by Nek Chand around 1957. It was discovered by the authorities in 1975, by which time it had grown into a 12-acre (49,000 m2) complex of interlinked courtyards, each filled with hundreds of pottery-covered concrete sculptures of dancers, musicians, and animals. The authorities took over, and the garden was inaugurated as a public space in 1976. It is presently run by the Rock Garden Society.
Nek Chand Saini is an Indian self-taught artist, famous for building the Rock Garden of Chandigarh, a forty-acre (160,000 m²) sculpture garden in the city of Chandigarh, India. His family moved to Chandigarh in 1947 during the Partition. At the time, the city was being redesigned as a modern utopia by the Swiss/French architect Le Corbusier. It was to be the first planned city in India, and Chand found work there as a roads inspector for the Public Works Department in 1951.