In memoriam

‘Listen to the site’

The music of Charles Correa Architect

THERE is a profusion of riches that Charles Correa leaves in his wake. You would expect that of an architect and urban planner of genius: iconic buildings, townships, a whole new city and ideas voiced far ahead of their times, all of which have attracted honours wherever in the world he has bestowed his music. (He would often say of an architect’s main duty, ‘He must listen to the site.’)

All this has been well covered by people more proficient than I in Charles Correa’s chosen fields. As for me, he is remembered every time we sit down to a meal at home. It has to do with our dining table, a brazensteal from the one in his flat in ‘Sonmarg’, Nepean Sea Road. It is square. He listened to the site.

There is, to start with, the simplicity of the idea. A square is orderly and easy for servings of the sumptuous fare that is always the order of the evening at the Correa’s. It seats12 persons exactly and comfortably. The architect places a cap on the number of his guests. So they cannot be just anybody.

The table encourages postprandial chat. Nobody goes anywhere after pudding. Thinking has been stoked. The 12 sit on and on. Twelve is a great number for Apostles. It aids a flow of soul. ‘In fact,’ says Anil Dharker in a column he wrote on Charles, ‘we felt incredibly intelligent there.’

The square table illustrates three of the many things that good architecture must accomplish. Serve. Please. Enrich. Charles’ thinking for ‘Sonmarg’ matches the sculpting of space, concrete and steel that emerges from his office.

Architects are blessed by their profession. It covers like none other a sweep of pretty much all of the arts and sciences. In the case of Charles Correa, he brought with him a mind and spirit already prepared for all that his profession would demand. He ended up a major figure in contemporary architecture around the world. At home, he played a pivotal role in creating the characteristic gestures of post-Independence architecture.

His first important project was the Gandhi Memorial at Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad (1958). Here was his first statement in the use of natural ventilation and passive energy, with the structure’s slatted panels doing duty for windows , courtyards (‘rooms open to the sky’) and the pitch of roofs contributing to effective ventilation, subtracting the need for air-conditioning.

He brought this approach to much else of his work e.g., the National Crafts Museum in New Delhi. He designed the Madhya Pradesh Legislative Assembly and Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal, the Jawahar Kala Kendra in Jaipur, ‘Kanchenjunga’, a 28-storied landmark at Kemps Corner, Mumbai, the British Council building in Delhi and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, Boston. In the late 1960s he designed the ITDC hotel in Kovalam, a building clinging to a hillside that looks out upon the Arabian Sea. The ‘Hotel Cidade de Goa’ was another of his hotel-by-the-sea creations. Abroad, one of Charles’ later, if more important, projects is the Ismaili Centre in Toronto, Canada. It is located in the midst of formal gardens, surrounded by a large park.

In 1984, he co-founded the Urban Design Research Institute in Bombay, dedicated to protection of the built environment and improvement of urban communities. In 1985, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi appointed him Chairman of the National Commission on Urbanization. From 2005 until his resignation in 2008, Charles was Chairman of the Delhi Urban Arts Commission. In 2013, the Royal Institute of British Architects held a retrospective exhibition, ‘Charles Correa – India’s Greatest Architect.’ It focused on the influence of his work on modern urban Indian architecture.

During the final four decades of his life, Charles pioneered thinking on urban issues and low-cost shelter in the Third World. As at any time, at home or elsewhere, his work placed emphasis on prevailing resources, energy and climate as major determinants in the ordering of space.

Predictably, it’s been prizes and awards all the way for Charles Correa, among the main ones being the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects (1984), the Praemium Imperiale of Japan – a Nobel of its kind (1994), and at home the Padma Shri (1972) and then the Padma Vibhushan (2006).

From 1970 to 1975, he was Chief Architect for New Bombay (Navi Mumbai), an urban growth centre of two million people across the harbour from the existing city of Mumbai. Here, along with Shirish Patel and Pravina Mehta, he was involved in extensive urban planning of the new city. Something that I share with Charles, apart from being ‘Bombaicars’ (Goans in Bombay), is a devotion to what we call home, the city of Bombay. And who knows if that extends to Mumbai. Over 30 years ago, he pressed a red alert which today needs to be a panic button about uncontrolled, unplanned growth of the city. He eyed the mainland from which the city pokes a finger into the Arabian Sea. There he saw a New Bombay.

A film got made about his visionary ‘City on the Water’. Near the end of the film, the voice-over (Pearl Padamsee) articulates Charles’ own concerns about the new city: ‘Do you think we will make it?’ going on to ask, ‘Do you think we will be able to turn Bombay again into a place we can live in and work in and enjoy being in?’

The way things have gone since then provide the answer. Politics and political goals are all – something with which Charles had a lifelong problem. Ours has become a democracy of the people, by the people but, far too often, against the people. There’s a postscript to ‘City on the Water’.

B.G. Deshmukh, Chief Secretary of Maharashtra at the time, has written A Cabinet Secretary Looks Back: From Poona to the Prime Minister’s Office. He recalls that in 1970 the state government notified acquisition of many thousands of square miles of agri land on the mainland. This was to be for New Bombay. But it never happened. Deshmukh, an on-the-spot witness, explains why.

A year later, in 1971, the V.P. Naik government received a bill for contribution to Indira Gandhi’s Garibi Hatao campaign. There was only one way he could pay: stall purchase of the land across the harbour and sell to builders land that was still under water in Backbay. This is now Nariman Point, a business district. It aggravates one of the huge problems Charles and his colleagues had sought to head off, those of an incurable North-South city. We were not cured. We are even worse off today than 40 years ago. We dropped the pilot and lost the plot.

The Charles Correa Plan of transforming Bombay’s mill lands into hundreds of square kilometres given back to the city for leisure and societal needs – this was opposed by the politician-builder nexus. Though the fight for the plan was won by Iqbal Chagla in the Bombay High Court, it was lost in Delhi in the Supreme Court. Nonetheless, the battle did something important. It showed that there was indeed land in Bombay that could be used in a humane, Charles Correa way.

So, all is not lost despite the corruptions the blunders and the investments in ugliness. The original vision has indeed become Vashi. A new Draft Development Plan for Mumbai does specify an obligatory trans-harbour bridge, a key point in Charles’ vision of introducing an East-West element in the way our city moves. Forty years late. But then we in India view time in an epic way. Everything is an eternal present.

Who knows what creeping catastrophes would have overtaken us if Charles’ ideas in the late 1960s had not been accepted by government – much to Charles’ own surprise.

Two final thoughts, one personal and perhaps trivia. It was 1961. I was in Lintas, the advertising agency. Our major owner and client, Hindustan Lever, was to participate in the International Trade Fair on Pragati Maidan. Who would design the pavilion? It is not clear quite how it happened, but the right decision got taken. Charles Correa.

He came up with what is now one of his more famous buildings. It was an elongated, crouching, windowless structure of exposed concrete, with ventilation and light arriving through vents (a Correa signature) placed at dramatic angles to the main structure. K.T. Chandy, a Hindustan Lever director who arrived to approve it, termed it ‘A cubist igloo’, a description drowned in the professional acclaim accorded to it then and ever since.

For some illogical reason, because I was a copywriter in the agency, I was put in charge of illuminating the structure, internally and externally. The answer seemed obvious to me: lay long tube lights along the lines wherever the ground met Charles’ soaring planes (or they met each other), inside or outside. Hopefully this would provide enough illumination.

It did. Charles looked at the net effect and the look on his face was a relief. ‘I’d never have thought of that,’ he said. ‘It looks great.’

And now the building which many consider his master work, which he himself prizes as his best work, the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal. To repeat what Charles has said unforgettably about architects and their work, ‘You must listen to the site.’ And what a site that is, where the mouth of the River Tagus kisses the Atlantic Ocean, 400 meters from the piers that launched the Portuguese caravels east and west into the unknown. It was the Kennedy Space Centre of the 16th century. Charles said, ‘My effort here is to get the Portuguese to feel again the oceans which they navigated and conquered, to bring back that sense of excellence which is latent even now.’ He adds, ‘Here I thought architecture could be sculpture. And beauty could be therapy.’

There is of course much else. Gita Mehta, a friend for over half a century, now in New York, writes in a mail about our loss of Charles, ‘You must all be devastated. He was so much a part of the best of another Bombay and another time when to be creative was the highest form of being.’

Anil Dharker ends his column about Charles saying, ‘There will never be another like him.’ To which we might add, ‘How will we do without him in our city?’ And indeed in our world, if we credit the citation of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Gerson da Cunha