Charles Correa in conversation with RIBA President Angela Brady

Transcription of Talk of Charles Correa with RIBA President Angelina                Brady

He has gifted 600 Items to RIBA including models and drawings from his life time work.

Question-Why digitizing your (Charles Correa) is so important to you?

Answer- I don’t want drawings to leave India because that is where the work is and is where the people will be more interested to see the works. But unfortunately there is no facility in India to digitize the works. If they exist then they exist in very bad condition and if they are supposed to go outside India then they should go to RIBA. As London is the best place where discussions happens, but the drawings should be in record so we decided digitizing drawings photographs.

Angelina: It’s not often that we get a give gift to RIBA that is magnificent, intact and already digitized, so thank you for that and it will be great for future generations to see and learn from it and the fact that its being digitized that it can be seen from any part of the world.

Question- When you started practicing in India in 1958 what did you like over there?

Answer- We know India was a fresh country and there was a wonderful feeling that everything is going to change and we will have a new kind of life that’s why they did Chandigarh and I think that Nehru told Corbusier that don’t look at the past,I want you to build the city of the future and it think  that it’s wonderful because when a country is brand new like south Africa in last decade then there are wonderful moments of hope as everything is so fragile that you have to adopt everything as it is.

Question- You have got a great sense of selection of cultural buildings and I want to talk particularly about Jkk Center and where the inspiration of 9 grid squares came from?

Answer- Well that comes from the city itself as the city is based on nine squares mandala which are the mandalas of nine planets and the ruler who built the city was obsessed by the sky. One side he used the oldest myth of the sky that is the nine planets and he is also the one who built the newest myths which is science that means those astronomical instruments like those triangles and squares on which we are heading toward time through which we can precisely note the movement of the sun because those instrument were made out f masonry other wise if they were made out of metal then they would have move here or there with the tram of the earth so he has these two different takes on the sky, he brought two things together in the city since he is memorial to the first prime minister so I think that it was better to bring back that essence of prime minister. Nehru even wrote his book Discovery of India in which he tried to find Old India in the ruins but he also commissioned Corbusier to invent a new India ,so it was a task that how to bring back those two visions together so that is why this happened.

Question- When you are working on all your projects you have a huge sense of human scale, it’s not iconic  that look at me I am architecture, yeas it is iconic in the way you done it. Tell me something about those recurring things like ritualistic pathways though your buildings and that per empty centers in you buildings. Where do they come from?

Answer- Well these empty centers come from the courtyard houses .The reason why my building look humanly is that I believe that building is a sculpture but it’s a sculpture used by human beings so it needs windows, doors, ventilation, light and air and these opening does not spoil the sculpture it just completes it, they also give scale to that abstraction. If you just make abstraction then it is not architecture to my mind. It has to be in a way that people use those gesture is very very important that it automatically gives a different look to the architecture as a post of sculpture

Question- Well talking about small scale building and even the large scale urban projects and tell us about your thought about cities, cities like Mumbai now and future how it’s going?

Answer- Well I don’t know about Mumbai where it is going but I think the city is wonderful, I don’t mean that it is wonderful right now but it has wonderful potential to change India in the right way as they have skillful persons which we require for change like doctors, nurses, lawyers, to begin the growth like Honkong third there is places of hope to grow.

Question – When you design you design for every sector of society like poor and rich. There is no barrier. So how do you address these things in your housing projects?

Answer- There are two ways one is by using broken stuff that is where you make low cost housing but still it is middle class housing where the roofs are like huge icebergs. There is huge section of poor people in Mumbai and half of them even can’t afford low cost houses so I have to design in manner that suppose there is room with courtyard then I got two rooms with different nature and then colonize it which is the way in which the village grows.

Question- I love your housing whether its is low rise or high rise because they are sustainable and what do you think of the people who built next to you like the glass skyscrapers which are totally unsustainable?

Answer- Well I do not like to think about them but for me the building is shaped n such a way that if I talk about igloos look like igloos as the architect tries to make the shape of the building which can combat with the climate conditions but right now people built high rise dumb glass buildings then by choosing low e-glass they try to get certification. It is because the mechanical engineer gets in solve your all the problems and that very bad because he denies me from my imagination because if we have to use the engineering thing we will use our engineering team to see all the ventilation, form where the light enters and from where it goes out.

Question- Well taking about sculpture art and architecture and you work many a times with art and architecture in your building and taking architecture as a metaphor and you have worked with many artists and your wife Monica is a much known artist. Do you work together?

Answer- No I have not actually. Other architects commissioned her but I have not maybe I should do that but i have learnt a lot from her weaving as weaving is lot like architecture it is like structure but i have worked with many architects like Huthcken. We did not work by giving the space and saying this is your space for architecture but we use paintings to modify architecture and use architecture to modify paintings, so in British council the whole facade steps backward and its shadow of tree become more complex.

Angelina- Yeah the three spaces from wherever you see its seems like a amalgamation of art and architecture. I have also worked with traditional artists like in Jkk they all are traditional artists of Rajasthan doing totally conventional images which they have in their mind and they recreate them. For some time I even worked with the people painting cinema posters for a hotel in Goa because they can do work very fast and it’s wonderful to see how it modifies the spaces.

Question- One thing I need to ask you about Jane drew whom you came across many times.

Answer- Jane drew was an architect in Chandigarh and one thing I entered into was  a completion of low cost housing so we designed those tube houses which works as machines for living and she was the jury member and she liked the design and rolled over everything  and gave the first prize. She came to Mumbai, i never knew her and she went to my friend’s office and said do you know Charles call him home

Question- What advice would you like to give to the future students?

Answer- I think about architecture that you can’t learn it but you cannot teach it and a good school is a school which make you passionate about architecture and teaches you how to ask question because your school does not know where you  are going to work , how will be the clients? But if you know that how to ask questions the you will get to know about the thing and will be able to develop your own visual vocabulary. That’s how you can learn better I know that I learnt some trade tricks and principals from MIT but i never liked them, and when I get back to India I never faced a problem of adjusting .I never made glass buildings though I used glass but never made it glass tower.

Angelina-That’s where your principals worked and now you have 150 over projects over here and thank you for donating all this to RIBA.