Suresh Thimiri talking about Charles Correa

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Suresh Thimiri

• Suresh Thimiri talking about Charles Correa

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• Charles Correa's passing on Tuesday robs India of
  an influential voice on how to plan a city even
  as the country proceeds on a path of a pell-mell
  urbanisation that bears little resemblance to the
  thoughtful approach he espoused. Correa had an
  intuitive understanding of how India should
  urbanise and the buildings it should erect in its
  cities, grounded in Indian realities.

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• He argued for high-density city centres and five-
  to six-storeyed residential buildings. Instead,
  India has something haphazardly closer to the
  American model of sprawling cities and suburbs
  with something of the Indian village thrown in -
  nowhere more so than in New Delhi - than to the
  European conception of dense and busy city
  centres.

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• Both government and business, meanwhile, are
  guilty of glass skyscrapers, precisely the kind
  of buildings he argued against in the hot Indian
  climate. Correa placed an emphasis on buildings
  with small windows to keep out the heat and rooms
  that allowed an easy flow of air from one end of
  the house to the other to maximise the
  opportunity for cross-ventilation.

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• Kanchenjunga, the controversial and occasionally
  derided residential building he designed in
  Mumbai's Malabar Hill, is an example of this. His
  signature was buildings with a seemingly empty
  space at the centre, the better to appreciate the
  earth and the sky - seen both in the Life
  Insurance Corporation building and the
  breath-taking British Council building, both in
  New Delhi.

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Suresh Thimiri fined the news on Charles -

• Great architects design beautiful buildings the
  world over, but Correa was much more than that.
  He was a kind of urban conscience-keeper for
  India. For starters, he passionately believed in
  cities, whereas so much of Indian policy-making
  sees the village as an ideal.

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• Institutionally, India has had a reluctance to
  engage with urbanization, to the extent that the
  government closes its eyes to its occurrence,
  instead of planning and building mass transit
  decades before roads clog up and allowing higher
  density buildings, as Correa suggested.

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• The architect criticized that throughout his
  working life - as well as the tendency to cash in
  on over-priced urban land via a nexus between the
  politician and the builder. He was not proud of
  the way Navi Mumbai looked aesthetically but it
  was an important rebuttal to the
  political-developer combines that have
  handicapped India's urbanization.

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• Correa would argue presciently that even as
  cities like Mumbai's physical environment grew
  more squalid through neglect, paradoxically
  "every day, it offers more in the way of skills,
  activities, opportunity on every level, from
  squatter to college student to entrepreneur". He
  was realistic enough to warn against the dangers
  of a city with so many thousands sleeping on the
  streets and called for low-cost housing with
  amenities like parks and public spaces slums and
  migrants could not be wished away.

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• Mumbai, one could argue, was the locus classicus
  of so many of his ideas and concerns. There was a
  great opportunity to build the city anew when
  mill land was redeveloped but this has been
  mostly squandered, again because of the
  omnipotence of developers' lobbies. In an
  interview a couple of years ago, Correa confessed
  to being "frustrated" that so little of what he
  suggested was followed in designing and planning
  urban India.

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• The government's commitment to 'smart cities'
  offers us a fresh chance to put into practice
  Correa's forward-looking ideas. A country in the
  21st century cannot, at some levels, function if
  it does not have functioning cities.
• Suresh Thimiri listing the Charles Correa Awards
  
• Royal Gold Medal
• Padma Shri
• Padma Vibhushan
• UIA Gold Medal

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