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Charles Correa: Through the eyes of his apprentice

Never had I heard anyone like him before.

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Charles Correa, passed away at the age of 84
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Charles always had this larger than life image before I met him. He’d just received the Japanese Praemium Imperiale award and I, only a few days into his studio, found myself staring because the image was, in fact, right. He was larger (rather taller) than me, and in his trademark white. What struck me most was the architecture — spoken so naturally, clearly, so forcefully. Never had I heard anyone like him before.

Architecture to me then meant separate things: style, fashion, engineering, maybe some climate, some theory and faint rumours about deeper layers of existence. Their inter-connections and then transformation to design was never addressed in school, left to the hapless student to figure out on the specious logic that design is personal! How does he even start?

But here in the studio, it was a beautiful, continuous narrative. Charles connected stuff naturally and logically. The design flowed through and architecture started to emerge. Of course, this naturalness didn’t come easy. The process of design was long – concepts, sketches, then models, drawings and back again, this refining repeated over and over. That wasn’t all. The even longer construction stage followed — in the real world, outside the safety of our studio, collaborating with engineers, contractors, authorities, who never knew all the layers. One wonders now how some of those buildings ever got built — Bhopal’s Vidhan Bhavan for instance, had so many contractors and regime changes over its 14 years — I was its fifth generation (thankfully final) architect. It was only his sheer force and unyielding energy that saw them through. Charles simply never backed down!

This energy carried into his concern for Mumbai. A simple idea he conceptualised with two colleagues created Navi Mumbai in the 1970s. Much of his vision was not adhered to and the system failed him repeatedly. But just look at the sheer scale of this new city, and you realise what architects are really capable of.

In all of this, it’s easy to forget that the studio operated in much the same world, with the same issues as everyone else, faces — multiple collaborations, cash-flows, inexperience, bad workmanship, unending follow-ups and deadlines. To top it all, was Charles’ impossibly high operating level and speed. He was tough to follow... definitely not for the faint-hearted.

Those details are long forgotten. All I remember now is what made those days special. His inexhaustible experiences and continual observations (non-stop even on two-hour flights), learning from mistakes (my area of expertise), joys of a new design, a fresh model... each day was this direct connect with the architectural universe, Charles’ continuous exchanges with us and the fraternity and of course those letters and post-cards from world leaders. Each day, we had this feeling of being a part of a brotherhood — something I sorely missed going solo. And each day was an end in itself, our inner sense trained to warn us if that day wasn’t. These are the qualities I stress on, now that I practice and teach – everything else surely follows.

Charles moved his studio, leaving architecture in a difficult place. He though will have it easy, after all that practice here.

(Ar Manu Shetty worked with Charles Correa for eight years)

 

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