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print versionArchitect of dreams - Charles Correa: 1930-2015
Malvika Singh
Charles Correa in 2002 (top) and the LIC building in Delhi’s Connaught Place designed by him
Charles Correa was a rare person, special and unusual. I was privileged to have known him and his wife, Monika, a textile master, from the time I was a young teenager, impressionable and curious, eager to reach out to men and women whose creativity, ideas and imaginative alternatives excited me to extend myself beyond the rigidity of going with the herd and to break away from doing what was expected of young people graduating from school. Charles was one such ’hero’ in my life. He remained an extraordinary individual, intellectually alive and sharp, right up until the last conversation that I had with him a couple of months ago, on the telephone, where we were discussing the restoration of one of his buildings in Jaipur.
Over the years, I would listen to long and leisurely conversations that he had with my parents that ranged from politics to town planning and design, and everything in between, because Charles believed, like many of his time, that politics was intrinsic to life and living and that good, egalitarian governance could introduce modernity within a tried and tested traditional frame. That a young, democratic India could well pattern an indigenous blueprint for growth in a changing world that could set the trend for the large number of developing countries struggling for their freedoms and liberal spaces. That human habitats and the surrounding environment needed to be oases of comfort where identities were respected, allowing different people and communities to feel confident and proud in their domains. The fundamentals of a design for living agitated his mind as he looked for answers and solutions for correcting all that was wrong with alien impositions that had created discomfort and unease in living patterns, often in conflict with climate and geography.
Charles was a true liberal mind, a public intellectual who always spoke out, loud and clear. He abhorred any intrusion into civil liberties and the freedom of expression. His writings, his architecture, his interventions in city planning and more, supported by his firm and unwavering political positions, made him stand apart among his peers. His architectural trajectory was diverse. Decades ago he designed one of the earliest seaside resorts for the India Tourism Development Corporation, on the beaches of Kovalam. With the rooms set into a hillock, the hotel rose up the slope into the sky, as it were. The design was unusual and made a dramatic statement at the time. It set a new standard. It broke convention. Then, years later, piercing through the laid-back, low skyline of Lutyens’s capital city he designed a red sandstone Life Insurance Corporation building that juxtaposed colonial Delhi with modernity and the future. Many of us were at the time critical of that intrusion. Gradually we began to accept its overarching, dominant place along our city skyline.
Decades later, he designed New Delhi’s most iconic contemporary low-rise building, a piece of three dimensional art much like ’installation architecture’, virtually one of its kind, that sits grandly, set back from the edge of the road on Kasturba Gandhi Marg. Installation art was an adolescent form on the Indian art scene at the time when Charles Correa bequeathed to Delhi yet another voice and form that represented an idiom of the future.
His other obsession was the horrific, careless and thoughtless degradation of Bombay, now Mumbai. Having seen the rapid dilution of civic dignity, his dream of a ’Navi Mumbai’ began to come alive, first on the drawing board and then, in its tangible form, in brick and mortar. The haphazard, unplanned growth of India’s towns and cities bothered his mind and person. Conservation of habitats was important in his scheme and alternate ideas for the expansion of urban areas with sensitivity was prime in his trying to make correctives in city manuals, proposals and projects for development. While designing and building individual structures for his diverse clients, he provoked, argued and debated, reflected on and absorbed from his wide experience and intellectual exploration, influencing many from all the generations that came within his orbit and under his spell as he elaborated ideas and engaged with endless initiatives.
Jawahar Kala Kendra, JKK, in Jaipur, was conceived as a centre for the arts. It was a prestigious project commissioned by the government of the state. Here again, Charles Correa created the unexpected. Because of the fertile continuity of skill and tradition, alive and robust in the minds, hands and souls of artisans and artistes, this set of buildings uses and showcases elements, motifs and symbols that manifest the inherent beliefs and philosophies of our ancient sciences and also influences from our classical treatises. He brought traditional painters into his experiment to embellish ceilings and walls with legacy statements from a familiar living tradition. Very few architects would have the guts to break out of the standard established confines and attempt to fuse modernity with tradition and create an energetic, contemporary space.
With the passing of Charles Correa, India and the world have lost a great dreamer, a vibrant thinker, a creative intellectual who used his ’architecture’ to express and share the ideas that jostled for space in his mind. Equally, he was an extraordinary friend who never let go of unconditional friendship for want of time in a schedule that was hectic, often unrelenting. I shall miss him hugely.
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Metroplus / The Hindu, June 21, 2015
Making dreams real
by Arun Rewal
A tribute to Charles Correa, who constantly attempted to find sensitive answers to questions about the built environment
Like he himself was in life, Charles Correa’s body of works is captivating and stands tall. Amongst the first moderns of Indian Architecture, Correa (1930 – 2015) was a visionary mind constantly occupied by efforts to find sensitive answers to questions about the built environment. He was concerned about the urban crisis, use of space and built form to tame climate and creating imagery.
Correa charted a discourse that valued the mythical, open space and problems of a developing nation in equal terms as the real, firmly defined or framing needs of his architecture. He drew with ease from music, fiction, history, collective memories and known environments to churn out dreams. These were anchored in narratives that involved myths and by an earnestness to solve problems of a living environment. This was his way of making a dream real.
Correa, who studied architecture at the University of Michigan and MIT, had the ability to read the most complex contexts and produce answers that were clear, simple, humane and grounded. He was a modernist whose repertoire incorporated the vernacular, art and imagery as well as geometrical playfulness. Correa’s work utilises ‘model paradigms’ pinned by realities. His design approaches provide strategies to create a rich quality of architecture. By reflecting expressions beyond reductive rationality, he like some of his modernist contemporaries succeeded in extending the immediate purpose of his works.
Beyond the apparent visual imagery of the “order systems’ developed in his architecture, Correa provided for scaled forms and rhythms. His architectural vocabulary includes cubic volumes, built forms sensitive to the climate and humane gestures. The shared focal space in his projects defined the architecture he created. Correa often employed abstracted vernacular and transformed ‘images’ to create a narrative that provided the focus for much his work. The architect used colour and even paintings as a tactic to make his metaphoric images forceful.
Charles Correa traced the development of his architectural interest to his childhood days of assembling the ‘Hornby Tinplak’ tack with a few locomotives and engines he had in his toy box. He would draw new possibilities of ‘journeys’ utilising the limited resources at hand on graph paper. His efforts lay in overcoming the banal and meaningless. He also perhaps derived from this ideas about flexibility and utilisation of finite resources that later structured many of his projects.
Correa’s distinguished professional practice spanned from the later part of 1950’s till recently was first set in Ahmedabad and later in Bombay. It produced a vast array of architecture and planning commissions. It encompassed a variety of scales, typologies and of contexts in India and overseas. At the age of 28, Correa designed the Gandhi Ashram Museum. Soon after, he created the Hindustan Lever Pavilion in Delhi, a maze traversing folded volumes finding delight in canons of light. Prominent works by Charles Correa include the Tube House, Ram Krishna House and Parikh House, Ahmedabad where the built form articulated volumes for ventilation and climatic control. Later he experimented with ‘climate as temperature regulator’ in the Previ Experimental Housing project in Lima, Cable Nagar Township in Kota and Tara Apartments in Delhi. Correa also skirted many controversies in his bold attempt to provide ‘reflections of surroundings’ in LIC Jeevan Bharati tower in Delhi and in his designs for Rajendra Place District Center in Delhi. For the dramatic Kanchenjunga Housing Tower in Mumbai, Correa planned rotating terrace verandahs. Correa in creating the CIDCO incremental Housing in Navi Mumbai put forth lessons from his reading of urban processes. Working at another scale, he created sensitive designs for Salvaco church in Mumbai and at Parumala in Kerala.
His sensibilities were simultaneously occupied by efforts to create ‘non buildings’ like the Handloom Pavilion, National Crafts Village museum and Bharat Bhawan. Correa designed the Kovalam and Bay Island, Port Blair resorts. In the design of Cidade de Goa he introduced imagery as a key component of the design character. He made Art and Imagery an integral part of his designs for the British Council Building in Delhi, Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur, Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune. For MIT’s Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex, Correa created a rich spatially layered atrium. The play of geometry and colour of its forms holds the building together. More recently for Champalimaud Centre in Lisbon and Ismaili Centre in Toronto, Correa embraced technology, refined materiality and geometrical playfulness to connect with the context. Art appears subdued in comparison to the quest for abstraction and imagination in this generative reinvention of his works. He builds on the strength of strong conceptual ideas that are holistic. They invite and indulge variations in perception within the rigour, disciple and control of the scheme he builds. ‘Truth is reborn in the narration’, Correa claimed.
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The New York Times | June 22,2015
Correa, architect, fused Indian history and modernism
By NIDA NAJAR
NEW DELHI — Charles Correa, an American-trained architect who returned to his native India to become a leading proponent of a new, indigenous architectural style, melding 20th-century Western modernism with Indian traditions, died Tuesday in Mumbai. He was 84.
The cause was lung cancer, his son-in-law, Rahul Mehrotra, said.
Correa reached deep into India’s past for inspiration in producing work that is notable for its imagination and breadth. He created striking museums and university buildings in India and abroad — including one at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his alma mater — as well as housing for a country with an ever-growing population.
In congested urban areas, he designed low-rise affordable housing to counter heat and incorporate open space; in Mumbai, he created a high-rise apartment building made to feel as airy as an Indian bungalow.
In another project, the Crafts Museum in New Delhi, Correa devised an arrangement of spaces linked by courtyards “through which visitors make their own route, as though exploring the streets or squares of a village,†The Guardian wrote in 2013 on the occasion of a retrospective of his work at the Royal Institute of British Architects. The institute called him “India’s greatest architect.â€
The Crafts Museum, Correa told the newspaper, expressed his idea of “experiencing architecture not as an object one looks at, but as an energy field one moves through.â€
His work was widely identified by its echoes of the ancient and the indigenous. One of his best-known early buildings was a Mahatma Gandhi memorial museum at Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad. It was meant to echo the look of the villages in which many of Gandhi’s ideas were rooted. Correa went on to build an arts center in Jaipur, drawing on the city’s original 18th-century design.
A fellow architect, Gautam Bhatia, said in an interview that even if Correa’s buildings were viewed out of context, “you would immediately be able to place them as Indian buildings.â€
Correa was born on Sept. 1, 1930, in the Indian city of Secunderabad. His parents were from the western coastal state of Goa, a former Portuguese colony, where many Indians had converted to Christianity and taken Westernized names.
Correa studied at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and MIT before returning to India and establishing his own company in Mumbai (then known as Bombay) in 1958, just 11 years after the country had gained independence from Britain. He was intent, he said, not on imitating the modernism he had studied in the West but on fusing it with India’s history and culture to create something new.
“India was a fresh country, and there was this wonderful feeling that everything was going to change and that you’d have a new kind of life,†he said of his return in a 2013 interview with Angela Brady, a former president of the Royal Institute. “There’s that wonderful feeling where there is so much hope and everything is so fragile. And you have to, at that moment, risk more, I think.â€
Correa designed buildings outside India in his later years. He was one of several top architects, including Frank Gehry, chosen to work on the MIT expansion, which included the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex, of which Correa was the lead designer. It was completed in 2005. He also designed the building that houses the Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations in Manhattan.
A recipient of many awards, he held visiting professorships at MIT, Harvard and elsewhere.
He is survived by his wife, Monika; two children, Nondita Correa-Mehrotra and Nakul Correa; and five grandchildren.
Correa was deeply invested in India’s urban future. He saw Mumbai, his adopted home, as a place of flourishing diversity and opportunity but also of strangling overpopulation. “A great city and a terrible place†was his description of Mumbai in an interview for “One City, Two Worlds,†a 2002 documentary film about the city that was conceived and narrated by Mehrotra, his son-in-law, who is also an architect.
Many say Correa’s urban efforts were never fully realized. His original plan for Navi Mumbai, or New Bombay, a satellite city meant to serve as a pressure valve for crowded Mumbai, was not fully executed, hampered by a “lack of political will,†his friend Anil Dharker wrote in a remembrance in The Indian Express.
Correa was for a time chairman of the Delhi Urban Arts Commission and the National Commission on Urbanization, but proposals made to the national commission are “gathering dust,†the architect Romi Khosla said.
“It was a tragedy of his life that he was not able to influence government, although they made him pretend he was,†Khosla said. He added: “His influence in India was not where it should have been. Charles’ influence has yet to emerge.â€
