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.
