His black round eyeglasses, in the style associated with Le Corbusier, were a nod to western architectural ideas. But Charles Correa, who died June 16 at the age of 84, reportedly of cancer, was deeply committed to the culture of his native India, which gained independence in 1947. His buildings, completed over nearly 60 years, were the “the physical manifestation of the idea of Indian nationhood, modernity and progress,” says architect David Adjaye, who designed an exhibition of Correa’s work at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London 2013. Correa donated his archives, including some 6,000 drawings, to RIBA, which awarded him its gold medal in 1984. At the time, Peter Murray, the editor of the RIBA Journal, called Correa “a master of light and shade, of space and climate, as well as an activist with a concern for the underprivileged in the Third World.”
Correa, born in Hyderabad in 1930, belonged to a generation of Asian architects who came to the U.S. to study — he earned degrees from both the University of Michigan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But he returned to India and became known, when he was just 28, for designing the Mahatma Gandhi memorial, (officially the Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya) in Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, 1958-63. A series of open-air pavilions, the building seemed to incorporate far more space than its walls could enclose. Many of his projects, which included expensive condos but more often housed the poor, provided glimpses of the sky, which he has said could make the difference “between livable habitat and claustrophobia.” He also worked to create “visual quiet,” in his words, amid sometimes cacophonous surroundings.
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