On his own terms

There are few architects who have stimulated the Indian architectural imagination as much as Charles Correa.

Charles Correa’s work, and indeed that of many contemporary Indian architects, pivots around a major cultural question after Independence and ever since: How can one be convincingly ‘modern’ and Indian at the same time?

The courtyard and the mall
One of Correa’s earliest works, the Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya in Ahmedabad (designed in 1958, the year he returned from MIT and began independent practice), adopted the traditional open courtyard as a major organising element for modern Indian buildings. The courtyard has gone on to become a staple of modern Indian architecture. His Salt Lake City Centre, Kolkata (completed 2004), meanwhile, has turned the American-building type of the shopping mall inside out. Instead of an airconditioned glass island turning its back upon the city, Correa’s mall centred on development that opens to the city and even offers it a public space. Uniting both buildings, conceived over 40 years apart, is a shared desire: to make places that carry forward relevant traditional values, but  are formed in a contemporary language.

 

His architectural achievements and formidable work in urban planning (he co-authoured the proposal for Navi Mumbai in 1966 with Shirish Patel and Pravina Mehta) explain his many national and international honours: the Padma Vibhushan, the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), and the Praemium Imperiale (a Japanese award) among others. 

Why is his work important?
In the time immediately after Independence, the ‘Indian’ and ‘modern’ paradox was a particularly fraught issue, since modernity was often thought of as being colonial in origin. So a frankly modern expression was susceptible to being read as endorsing the nation’s former enslavement. On the other hand, (colonial) modernity had itself incubated the young nation, and was now woven into the very fabric of the republic. There was also a parallel question: what do we mean by ‘Indian’ architecture?  Where could one locate the ‘real’ India? In the period before colonisation? In the village communities untouched by the colonial state? Or in the cities which promised to take India ahead economically? And if you did find some trace of ‘original’ India, could you simply replicate it, ignoring the fact that everything had changed actually even within it?

Correa and Corbusier
The tension of these contrary pulls resonates with the tension that animates Correa’s architecture. Like a good story, Correa’s best work is marked by a basic internal conflict or contradiction, sometimes at the level of form and in others at the level of meaning. The resolution of the conflict is often the key to the drama and delight of the outcome. Though he never worked with Le Corbusier, this tension is the main resonance Correa’s work sets up with the French master’s work, whose formal language is also central to Correa’s sensibility.

Some landmark projects
Kanchanjunga (built 1983), the high-rise apartment block that towers over the busy Peddar road in Mumbai, is a good example of how the internal contradiction creates drama in Correa’s work. A deft stack of duplex units span the width of the building’s footprint (to allow cross ventilation), and in the process the building embodies different paradoxes. On the one hand, it is a severe, modernist cuboid mass which does not reveal its different storeys immediately. On the other, the double-storey bites out of its body are a rich clutter of colours and forms that are an effective counterpoint to the ‘reticence’ of the building as a whole. Another internal contradiction is visible from the road. The side walls of the duplex terrace meeting at an internal corner are clad in tiles of different warm colours. The visual effect is to make them appear like thin independent planes. But the building as a whole is expressed as a massive and crisp solid. By putting into play contrary intentions in the same form, Correa pushes Kanchanjunga towards visual disequilibrium, but does not let it tip over.

Of course, Kanchanjunga is a typically modernist structure. Loved by architects for its enigmatic nature, its abstraction and scale, however, daunt many lay people. At the other end of Correa’s range, however, there is a remarkable collection of ‘non-buildings’, mostly cultural institutions, many of which have become places people visit the same way they go to parks. In these projects, the architect’s impress is not visible in built form as much as in the invitation of the shaped space.

At Kala Akademi, by the riverside in Panaji, Correa turns the building into a sprawling veranda by the water. The auditoria, offices and other spaces form a reticent frame around the invitation to enter.

The National Crafts Museum, New Delhi, meanwhile, only has a low running wall with a small entrance to show for its many thousands of square feet of space inside. Having drawn you inside, Correa makes up for New Delhi’s windswept anonymity with an engaging (if slightly stagey) rustic environment that makes you want to return often. Perhaps the most remarkable of his non-buildings is Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal where he pushes 80,000 sq ft of masonry and concrete underfoot so that you never really ‘see’ the building. The entire campus is conceived as a garden by the sloping lakeside for people to wander across. They often do.

The Indian in the modern
One tension in much of Correa’s work is between broadly opposed Western and Indian architectural values. Kala Akademi, Panaji, and the MRF corporate headquarters in Chennai are both minor monuments set against nature and neighbourhood. They are also intimate and inviting habitats. To enrich this tension, Correa has often used vivid colour (recalling the Mexican architect Luis Barragan’s work), illusionistic murals and serious artworks to challenge the weight of his own forms.

Calculated risk
The play of contradictions is risky, of course. Correa has been criticised in the past for exoticising Indian tradition by placing folk motifs and myths in the alien context of modernist form. Such criticism is justified on its own terms. For instance, the overall effect of the Vidhan Bhavan in Bhopal, a promising form against the sky, is seriously weakened by the Indianised details, the multi-coloured patterns, and independent artworks crowding some large interior spaces. Neither the ‘Indian’ elements, the Western formal language nor the hybrid totality achieve a convincing presence amid the criss-crossing of diverse intentions. But this criticism also highlights Correa’s central contribution: giving form to the very contradictions that are central to being ‘modern’ and ‘Indian’ at the same time.