India’s ‘greatest architect’ Charles Correa dies

From Toronto to Lisbon to Boston and Mumbai, Charles Correa's architectural legacy will remain long after his death.

Indian architect Charles Correa died at the age of 84 on June 17, 2015. T Manan Vatsyayana / AFP Photo

NEW DELHI // Charles Correa, the renowned Indian architect who believed in airy, light-filled buildings that integrated into his country’s environment, died on Wednesday at the age of 84.

Correa designed structures as far afield as Toronto, Lisbon and Boston, but most of his projects were in India. The nimbleness of his designs was reflected by the varied nature of his iconic buildings: low-cost apartments, office buildings, museums, churches, legislatures, new townships, and scientific institutes.

Throughout his career, he disdained the cookie-cutter glass-and-steel skyscrapers that have now come to populate the skyline in his city of Mumbai; “idiot buildings”, he called them in an interview two years ago.

“We have all come too far away from the fundamentals,” he said then to The Guardian. “We have surrendered more and more to engineers, who manage to prop up any design and manage to heat and cool any kind of shape. Ultimately, we are the losers: everything has left architecture except whimsy and fashion.”

On Twitter, Prime Minister Narendra Modi offered his condolences.

Correa’s “architectural marvels are widely cherished, reflecting his brilliance, innovative zeal and wonderful aesthetic sense”, Mr Modi said.

Born in Secunderabad in 1930, Correa completed his bachelor’s in architecture at the University of Michigan in 1953 and then his master’s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955. He chose to return to India immediately afterwards, where he established his own practice in 1958.

“The India of those days was a different place,” he once told the Times of India. “It was a brand new country. There was so much hope. India stimulated me.”

Correa believed that Indian buildings should not retreat from the realities of the climate. Rather, they should be open to the sky, take full advantage of plentiful light, and adjust to fierce heat as well as heavy rain.

Given India’s relative poverty as a country, they should also be inexpensive to build, creating equitable spaces that draw heavily from “vernacular” – or indigenous – architecture.

One of his most recognisable buildings in Mumbai, the Kanchanjunga apartment building – built in 1983 and holding 32 luxury units – reflected Correa’s philosophies deeply.

Each apartment possessed a “garden veranda” – a cube cut into the edge of the tower that relieved its rigid lines but also offered families access to the open air while removing their rooms deeper into the building, away from the sun.

The verandas were a nod to the traditional courtyards that lay in front of the classic Indian bungalow.

Other notable projects included the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Museum in Ahmedabad; the Parumala Church in Parumala, Kerala; the Jawahar Arts Centre in Jaipur; the Madhya Pradesh legislative assembly in Bhopal; and various arts museums across the country.

One of Correa’s most recent major works was the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, a biomedical research facility completed in Lisbon in 2010.

Sitting at the site where the River Tagus meets the sea, the structure commemorates older Portuguese voyagers who forayed into the unknown, such as Vasco da Gama and Henry the Navigator.

The white buildings curve gently and are studded with large round windows that look almost like portholes on a ship.

Correa designed entire townships as well, revolving around his idea of integrated living. Corporations commissioned him to design settlements around their factories or plants: a cement company’s township in Wadi, Andhra Pradesh, for instance, or the Malabar Cements Township in Kerala.

He helped plan a new segment of Mumbai – New Bombay, across the harbour – in the early 1970s, and urged the city to relocate its government offices there to help it thrive. That never transpired, however, and Correa was saddened by what he saw as the failure of his project.

“The idea was to open up land on the edge of the harbour,” he said in a speech in Mumbai in 2010. “It would have been so beautiful.”

Correa won numerous honours for his work, including the United Kingdom’s Royal Gold Medal of Architecture, the Chicago Architecture Award, Japan’s Praemium Imperiale award in the arts, and India’s Padma Vibhushan. In 2013, the Royal Institute of British Architects called him “India’s greatest architect”.

In 1986, the then-prime minister Rajiv Gandhi named Correa the first chairman of the National Commission on Urbanisation.

The commission later published a report warning that, without proper planning, India’s cities would become inequitable and that their infrastructure would decay.

But these suggestions were largely ignored, a fact that frustrated Correa endlessly. In his talks, his tall frame and shock of white hair distinctive even at a distance, he criticised governments and politicians for failing their cities, and he railed against architects who planned buildings with no consideration for their surroundings.

But he never stopped championing the ideal of the city or retreated from modern architecture.

“In India, we have to reclaim modernity for ourselves,” Correa said at the RIBA in London in 2013. “The whole world has a right to be modern. It’s not a style, it’s an attitude.”