In 1958 Charles Mark Correa was awarded two commissions that would showcase his approach to architecture: the Pavilion for the All India Handloom Board in New Delhi (1958) and the Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya, a museum and archive at Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram on the banks of the Sabarmati River in Ahmedabad (1963). Designed and built in six months, the temporary Handloom Pavilion consisted of a series of stepped earth-filled platforms contained within a square enclosure of sun-dried bricks and shaded by freestanding wood and handloom-fabric parasols. The exhibition unfolded as the visi- tors in the first sequence ascended the platforms and then, in the second sequence, descended in a spiral manner. The subtle interplay of enclosed and semienclosed spaces brought about by a shifting axis, later to become a leitmotif of Correa’s work, also formed the central device in the Gandhi Sangrahalaya.

The existing buildings in Gandhi’s ashram were whitewashed one-story masonry structures with tiled roofs, some of which had a linear arrangement, while others, such as Gandhi’s own residence, were wrapped around a small courtyard. Correa’s addition addressed this typology in an assemblage of pavilions arranged around a central water court, only four of which, containing archival material, were enclosed. The tiled-roof structures were supported on a modular system of masonry columns and reinforced- concrete beams that also served as rainwater conduits. The result was a serene atmosphere: alternating open and covered spaces, the dapple of light and shade, a few carefully chosen trees in the courtyards, the reflection of the water, and the breeze from the river. The profoundly antimonumental gesture of the Gandhi Sangrahalaya, in fact, monumentalized the “village” idea central to Gandhi’s philosophy. It augmented a decisive departure in 20th-century architecture from accepted canons of monumentality and the memorialization of national heroes. These two early projects also challenged the heroic modernism then unfolding in Chandigarh and Ahmedabad in the works of Le Corbusier.

In over 140 projects that have followed, Correa has used a minimal set of formal devices—the stepped platform reminiscent of wells and river ghats, the open-to-sky space in the form of terraces and courts, the freestanding parasol roof, the split-level space to minimize full-height walls, the shifting axis of pedestrian movement, the square module, and the framed view—to create a complex spatial repertoire. Although the importance of open-to-sky space takes the form of generous terrace gardens and courts sculpted from the sloping site and enhanced by judicious framing of the lake view at Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal (1981), the same principle is used to carve out double-height garden terraces and provide an environmental buffer of verandas and service spaces in the high-rise Kanchenjungha Apartments in Bombay (1983). In both cases it is the subtle manipulation of the building section belying the apparently simple plan arrangements that enabled him to attenuate the microclimate and at the same time make sculptural statements. In the Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations in New York City (1992) and the Alameda Park Project in Mexico City (1994–), these spatial voids/framed views became giant “urban windows”—his signature—that address the urban scale while offering the outsider a hint of the layered spaces inside. His formal principles apply as well for a luxury condominium as they do for low-cost housing. As he noted in a postcolonial manifesto—The New Landscape (1985)—both rich and poor, grand monuments and vernacular buildings, share the same landscape.

His writings presented alternate possibilities for building practice and urban planning. In an unusual move for an architect, he argued that the solution to the problem of so- called Third World housing resided not in more innovative technology or new materials or even better architectural design, but in socio-spatial equity and a great deal of common sense. He himself, however, designed several low-cost housing schemes (e.g., Belapur, 1986) in response to what he labeled the “belligerently anti-visual” approach to low-cost housing among architects. His “housing bill of rights” included concepts such as incrementality, pluralism, identity, income generation, disaggregation, and the “equity plot”—in urban areas each family should be allotted a plot between 50 and 75 square meters. Many of his ideas seemed to ignore the complexity of urban problems, and yet he was fully cognizant of the deep sociopolitical implication of his suggestions. In urging an integral look at the landscape that would overcome barriers between different institutions and experts, Correa was essentially questioning the fundamentals of eco nomic and physical planning theory and the design process that had failed to answer housing needs around the world—whether in India, the United States, or the former Soviet Union. Many of his concepts have been successfully used at an architectural scale, but implementation at an urban level remains unfulfilled. His writing displays a rare clairvoyance and profound belief in the possibilities of a socialist democracy and the “third option”—the term “Third World,” he reminded his readers, was coined not to facilitate an ordinal ranking of nations but to generate the possibility of an alternative, “one different from Joseph Stalin’s USSR and John Foster Dulles’ USA.”

Since the 1970s, like many architects around the world, Correa has included more features of popular culture, color, and allusion to enrich his primary architectural vocabulary, which had already been formulated by the first decade of his practice. The brilliant color scheme of the tourist resort of Cidade de Goa in Dona Paula (1982) that exceeded the modernist primary palette was accentuated with trompe l’oeil to create a “city” that was part imagined, part illusory, and part real. He has successfully used paintings and sculptures (often in collaboration with well-known artists) to enhance the spatial architectonics (for example, in the Kala Academy in Panaji, Goa, 1984; the British Council in New Delhi, 1992; and the Inter-University Center of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, 1992), and in doing so has been instrumental in resituating painting as a legitimate accompaniment to contemporary architecture. This interest in popular sources has also been increasingly accompanied by a vocabulary that attempts to root his architecture not just in the vernacular but in what he calls the mythic values of Indian tradition. Not surprisingly, some of this early experimentation in vocabulary (the kudil, “individual suite”; otla, “raised platform”; and chattai, “rush mats”) took place in resort hotels that paid homage to ethnic chic and government patronage of India’s craft tradition. The now ubiquitous kunds (rectangular pools) and mandalas (cosmic diagrams) appearing in Correa’s recent projects were most flamboyantly used in the Jawahar Kala Kendra Museum in Jaipur (1992) with its nine-square mandala plan, stone inlaid symbols of planets, and brilliantly painted, overscaled murals. When read against the architect’s explanatory texts, they indicate a complex negotiation between the ascribed position of a Third World architect, who is expected to express his regional identity (as opposed to a “Western” architect, who is not), and the desire to supersede such binding propositions.

By aligning the aesthetic inspiration from a local tradition with a universal language of science and metaphysics, he attempts to reverse the route and the terms through which universal principles were supposed to enter the world of modern architecture. In a practice that has spanned four continents and a vast range of government institutions, corporate offices, museums, hotels, and residential designs, Correa has employed an architectural syntax that fluidly travels between contexts and serves as one of the most convincing critiques of the principles of a universalized modernism and its Euro- American bias. Apart from his own ruminations on architecture, there are three monographs on Correa and scores of articles that comment on individual projects, a complete list of which is available in the 1996 monograph.

SWATI CHATTOPADHYAY 

Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.1 (A-F).  Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.

1 September 1930 Born in Hyderabad, India;

1946–48 Attended St. Xavier’s College, Bombay;

1949–53 studied at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, under Buckminster Fuller and Walter Sanders;

1953 received a bachelor’s degree in architecture;

1953–55 studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, under Buckminster Fuller and Lawrence Anderson;

1955 received a master’s degree in architecture;

1956–58 Partner, G.M.Bhuta and Associates, Bombay;

from 1958 Private practice, Bombay;

1961 Married Monika Sequeira Kamat :2 children;

1962 Albert Bemis Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology;

from 1964 member, council, Indian Institute of Architects;

1964 Fellow, Indian Institute of Architects;

1971–74 chief architect, City and Industrial Development Corporation, Government of Maharashtra;

from 1973 member, Western Board, Reserve Bank of India;

1974 visiting critic, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts;

1974 Bannister Fletcher Professor, University College, London;

1976 and 1977 visiting critic, University of Bombay;

from 1977 member, Steering Committee, Aga Khan Awards, Paris;

1979 Arthur Davis Visiting Professor, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana;

1979 honorary fellow, American Institute of Architects;

1981 visiting critic, Massachusetts Institute of Technology;

1982 visiting critic, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia;

1982–83 consultant to UN University, Tokyo;

1984 visiting critic, Columbia University, New York;

1984 fellow, Royal Institute of British Architects 1993. Gold Medal, Royal Institute of British Architects;

1985–88 chairman, National Commission on Urbanization;

1990 Gold Medal, International Union of Architects;

1998 Aga Khan Award for Architecture;

16 June 2015 Died,Mumbai, Maharashtra India.

Selected Publications

Charles Correa, 1984; revised edition, edited by Hasan-Uddin Khan, 1987

Further Reading

Ashraf, Kazi Khaleed, and James Belluardo (editors), An Architecture of Independence: The M aking of M odern South As ia, New York: Architectural League of New York, 1998

Bhatt, Vikram, and Peter Scriver, After the M as ters , Ahmedabad: Mapin, 1990

Khan, Hasan-Uddin (editor), Charles Correa, revised edition, New York: Aperture, and Singapore: Concept Media, 1987

Prakash, Vikramaditya, “Identity Production in a Post-Colonial Indian Architecture: Re- covering What We Never Had,” in Post-Colonial Space(s), edited by Gülsüm Baydar Nalbantoglu and Chong Thai Wong, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997  

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