Charles Correa was grounded in beauty

Contemporary India’s default style is Low Pell-Mell, with little thought put into how buildings look. And, in far too many cases, when some thought seems to have been put into their making, one sorely wishes it hadn’t. Charles Correa proved the exception to this ugly rule. The 84-year-old Secunderabad-born could have, like so many other talented architects, only sought out projects in places where wonderful structures would not jut out as beautiful oddities.

But Correa was not only a student of form following function, but he was also someone who believed that art is site-specific.

Thus, Correa’s angular creations everywhere: the Kanchanjunga Apartments in Mumbai with its honeycombed walls and ‘vertical bungalows’ that suck in the sea breeze; the vaastu-conspired Jawahar Kala Kendra in Jaipur with its local materials and aesthetics; the City Centre shopping complex in Kolkata with its corridored promenades.… It is no small irony that most of us first learnt about the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, a biomedical research facility in Lisbon, Portugal, from a discredited cricket administrator this week in the news. Correa made the curving, ship-like sprawl on the seafront “to create a piece of architecture…as Beauty. Beauty as therapy.” Which is what he also brought to places far less serene.