When the great Charles Correa died almost a decade ago in June 2015, here is how the Royal Institute of British Architects eulogized him: “Charles Mark Correa had presence, physically and intellectually.
Tall, silver-haired from middle age, combative in debate and with a mischievous wit, he was an acolyte of Le Corbusier but whose own work went in a very different, more mystic and organic direction: an architecture that grew up with and helped to define modern, independent India. For him context was everything, whether that was for a cultural centre or a complete urban district. He received the Royal Gold Medal of the RIBA as early as 1984, the Praemium Imperiale a decade later, and the Aga Khan Award in 1998, and came to be known as modern India’s greatest architect.”
That last clause is vital, and even if Mustansir Dalvi never goes so far as to make an identical claim in his excellent new Citizen Charles (Niyogi Books), the sweep of intellectual and social history evoked in his first-rate biography makes it clear why this archetypical Bombay Goan (albeit born in Secunderabad) was so unique, and left such an impactful legacy. As the celebrated Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye aptly summarized some years ago, “his work is the physical manifestation of the idea of Indian nationhood, modernity and progress. His vision sits at the nexus defining the contemporary Indian sensibility and it articulates a new Indian identity with a language that has a global resonance. He is someone who has that rare capacity to give physical form to something as intangible as ‘culture’ or ‘society’ – and his work is therefore critical: aesthetically; sociologically; and culturally.”
Citizen Charles is less than 200 easy-to-read pages, but outstandingly comprehensive nonetheless. For this, huge credit to Dalvi, another quintessential ‘Bombaywallah’ – he recently retired after 21 years on the faculty of the storied Sir JJ College of Architecture – whose unbeatable mastery of his subject matter shines throughout. A familiar and well-loved annual presence at the Goa Arts + Literature Festival in his distinguished parallel career as poet and translator, here is the multifaceted author in yet another avatar: the highly polished academic and architectural historian, who has given us an instantly invaluable portrait of the city of Mumbai, of architecture in India after 1947, and also the paths not taken which have come to define our current era, while at the heart and spine of this fine new book, of course, is the proud son of Goa and his “lifelong advocacy for an egalitarian and uniquely
Indian urbanism.”
“Charles Correa was a posthumous child,” writes Dalvi. “His father died of an aneurysm a week before he was born.” Five years later in 1935, his mother Florinda moved to her family home in South Bombay, where “as a child, Charles would love to walk down to watch ships, big and small, come and go at the Ballard Pier. He was especially fond of the dry docks, where ships would be lifted out of the water in their entirety. He would be in awe of the massive hull, rising above him like an upside-down roof. Back home, Charles would obsess over his train set. Here he would learn that a drawing is a metaphor for a way of seeing beyond the confines of paper. Through its lanes and avenues, Charles would see how concepts and order, first visualised in two dimensions, can be realised in built form.”
Much of Correa’s resume is familiar and famous: St Xavier’s School, then a couple of years at St Xavier’s College before gambling fortuitously to the University of Michigan in 1948, at just 18 years of age, where he flourished in undergraduate architecture studies, and gained his first great mentor, the visionary genius Buckminister “Bucky” Fuller. Immediately after his Master’s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955, the idealistic young Indian returned home, where he – says Dalvi – became one of the four essential architects (the others are Habib Rahman, Achyut Kanvinde and Balhrishna Doshi) who created “the visual vocabulary for the architecture of independent India and provided a momentum to Nehru’s aspirations for a modern country in the larger comity of nations.”
Since a lot of this is well-known, I asked Dalvi whether he encountered anything new in the course of his research. He told me that “while writing this book, I would be constantly delighted by the manner in which Correa could resurrect, reinvent and readapt ideas from some of his earliest work into his later projects. He was never obsessed with 'the shock of the new', a very modernist predilection, but could create very original designs by (to use a phrase from his mentor, R. Buckminster Fuller) 'rearranging the scenery'. His Masters dissertation sought citizen participation as something to aspire for, and he kept this in mind when working on the Regional Plan for Goa. His design from his earliest mass housing schemes in Peru can be seen inspiring his Artist's Village in Belapur Navi Mumbai. Every project of his emerged from the basic premise that climate leads the manner in which the architecture will ultimately be realised.”
It's an interesting insight, of which evidence can be seen writ both large and small in Goa, in the (now criminally trashed) Kala Academy and the Fontainhas headquarters of Charles Correa Foundation, which are characterized by the same ineffably Indian less-is-more design vocabulary. Each building is meticulously crafted for its separate location, and kitted out for totally different purposes, but their authorship – although separated by several decades - is easily recognizable, and distinctly the same. Some years ago, on a most memorable evening on the wing on a sailboat down the Tagus, it was inexpressibly moving to perceive that same architectural language articulated on the grandest of scales at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, an outright masterpiece that is for me the most profound and perfect Indian building of the 21th century, in direct view of the Torre de Belém, the historic launching point for Vasco da Gama’s journey of discovery with such consequential results for all of us, and history itself..
Dalvi told me that “the next generation of Indian architects would do well to emulate Correa's critical stance towards Modernism, Internationalism and cultural heritage. He rejected none of these but sought to contextualise each where he could. He looked at Indian culture as a 'deep structure' and sought to make its intangibles manifest rather than simply repeating its visible tropes. Most important of all, his approaches to design always kept the end user at the forefront. I wish young architects would remember this. The one lesson he leaves his fellow citizens is that we are all in it together, and it is best if they are active participants in all important decisions concerning their city.”
India’s smallest state is unbelievably awful about remembering its own greatest daughters and sons, but it has occurred to me it would be fitting to rename Goa College of Architecture after Correa. However, when I asked Dalvi about this idea, he demurred: “I hope that Goa will always remember its native son fondly, and preserve, protect and use his buildings in the best way possible. As a matter of principle, I am not in favour of renaming institutions, especially replacing place names with people names. Goa College is as good a name as any, and Goa’s citizens can find a variety of other ways to celebrate their Goencho Munis.”