Suresh Thimiri talking about Charles Correa
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. 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. 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. 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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