May 5, 2011

Void Form

Himanshu Burte

(Catalogue essay for monograph to be produced on the occasion of Charles Correa

being receiving an award from the Goa government. The Catalogue had two other
essays, one by Joseph Rykwert and another by Charles Correa himself. Published 2011
by Govt of Goa, Panaji, India)

In his famous 1930s essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’,
Walter Benjamin makes a passing, but profound, comment about our experience of
architecture. Benjamin suggests that like with film, the work of architecture is usually
experienced collectively in a state of distraction. On the face of it, it is not difficult to
agree with observation. However beautiful the building or interior space, we are usually
more concerned with our own everyday agenda- getting dressed in time, returning calls,
looking for the tea stall in the theatre- to bother about the elegant corner detail. When we
inhabit it the best architecture emerges into our attention only intermittently. Common
though this experience is, Benjamin’s suggestion can make serious architects
uncomfortable. Architecture is widely accepted as an art, after all. And in modern times,
it is considered sacrilege to be distracted for long when faced with an artwork. That is
why museums and auditoria are such silent spaces full of attentive and solitary
individuals. So is not something wrong if people routinely appropriate architecture, often
hailed as the mother of all arts, without giving it the respect of concentrated attention?

It might sound strange to suggest that this question offers one fruitful way of approaching
the work of Charles Correa. Strange, because there is little danger of being distracted
away from the architecture while visiting a building by Correa.

Correa’s architecture has always been theatrical. Yet, in his best work, its theatricality
calls attention to the architecture while also enriching our sometimes absentminded
appropriation of habitable spaces. The theatricality of Correa’s architecture has not been
that of the solely dramatic pose. Rather it has often emerged from an exquisite internal
tension between two opposed ideal states of architecture he appears to pursue
simultaneously in his buildings- that of the monument that arrests our attention with its
power and the non-building, a setting that makes our everyday habitational actions look
and feel unusually graceful. I believe that the contrast Benjamin sketches between the
modes of concentrated and distracted attention to art works and architecture respectively
is a useful way of approaching this tension and mirrors that between the monument and
the non-building as architectural ideal states. I also believe that this tension plays out in
parallel with another tension, that between Correa’s modernist training and outlook on
the one hand, and his need for situating his work securely within different Indian
contexts.

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Half a century of building

Correa is today internationally acknowledged for his critical and localized

reinterpretation of modernism, as well as his work in urban planning in India. He has won
most major international architectural honors, as also the Padma Vibhushan from the
Government of India. Born in Hyderabad in 1930, Correa completed his architectural
education in the USA, including an undergraduate degree from Michigan State
University, Ann Arbor, and a Masters in City Planning from Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT). He started an independent architectural practice in Mumbai in 1958
and has since designed a large number of buildings that have been seminal to the
development of Indian modernism, while also contributing new ideas to contemporary
architecture worldwide. In a career that now spans over fifty three years, he has also
contributed massively to urban planning in India, most notably through the plan for Navi
Mumbai of which he was a co-author (with Shirish Patel and the late Pravina Mehta), and
later as the chairman of the National Commission on Urbanisation in 1985.

Fifty three years is a long time for an architect to have been in active practice. As Correa
winds up his studio in Mumbai, it is even more remarkable to see clear continuities
between his earliest and his most recent projects, different as they are in place, program
and expression. In the year he started his independent practice Correa began work on one
of his most important projects to date, the Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya, Ahmedabad
(1958-1962), located in the premises of Gandhiji’s Sabarmati Ashram. This checkerboard
arrangement of open courtyards and museum spaces presenting Gandhiji to the visitor
through text, image and memorabilia was an early consideration of the traditional
courtyard as a substantive component of a modern Indian grammar of architecture. The
museum foreshadowed many themes that would recur in Correa’s later work. One
understated aspect of the museum design is the way in which the layout encourages the
visitor to literally ‘spread’ his walk across the building.

Half a century later, the much larger medical research facility, Chamapalimaud Centre,
Lisbon (500,000 sq.m, built in 2010), is similar yet different. It too is designed as an
invitation to wander around, though, instead of the meditative courtyards here the walk
leads to the widescreen panorama of sky meeting sea.

Both can be thought of fruitfully as ‘non-buildings’, a term Correa himself has often
used. However, it is important to approach them in terms of the tension between the
monument and the non-building mentioned earlier. This is because the sculptural, and
even monumental, dimension of architecture is also explored equally convincingly in
Correa’s work. A discussion of this expressive dimension is important with regard to
Correa’s work to prevent a simplistic misreading of the idea of the non-building.

Non-building, in Correa’s work, is not non-architecture. Rather, the ‘non’ applies mainly
to the common tendency of buildings, especially large ones, to colonise attention and
impose their presence on us. Monuments repress us, even if ever so slightly or

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pleasurably, by demanding that we concentrate our attention on them, or rather, by
making it difficult for us to turn our attention away to our own experience or existence.

In a range of projects, many public and institutional ones, Correa has sought to partly
repress the objectness of the building to unfurl the potential for human action that its
space carries. Yet, rarely does Correa erase the monumental possibility of architecture
completely. When he does so most thoroughly, as at Bharat Bhavan, we are left without
any mark of the institution hidden in the landscape. We walk through the gate and are
disoriented for a while not having an architectural object- a building- with which to
engage as the representation of the institution. We recognize in that moment of confusion
that the monumental function of architecture is also important. For it is the monument
that makes visible an abstract social or organizational presence- the institution- that the
building shelters.

In fact, it is difficult to find a project by Correa which does not have sculptural or
monumental ambition at some level even as it embodies the ideal of the non-building.
What we find, rather, is a changing balance of the opposed explorations. That balance
keeps shifting across the continuum of ideals from the monumental-sculptural towards
that of the non-building, and the other way round, depending on the program and physical
context that a design responds to.

It is, in fact, this simultaneous movement towards contradictory ideals at every moment
in his architecture that makes for its special feel. The twin frustrums of the Portuguese
church in Mumbai, for instance, present a monumental-sculptural intention towards the
street. But as you enter, its intimately scaled forecourts enclosed by a peripheral ‘wrap
wall’ begin to pull away from the monumental intention of the concrete frustrums. The
experience of monumentality then reemerges in the interior space of the church under the
soaring concrete frustrums.

The modernist and the non-building

Against this background, it is perhaps worth dwelling a bit on the expressive depth that
Correa has brought to the ideal of a visually and experientially memorable non-building.
This is important because the modernist approach to architecture has leant much more
towards the monument, especially the enigmatic monument. The modernist paradigm was
centred on the abstract, sculptural object in a park, say like Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye
in Poissy in France, or Mies Van der Rohe’s Farnsworth house near Chicago. Both, of
course, had a strongly expressive spatial quality within. However, their most famous
photographs are of industrial-age objects standing clearly apart from the flux of everyday
social life in the green emptiness of a natural setting. Each is internally well integrated.
There is a sense of completion and finality to their composition. There are no loose ends
and no components of either building diverges in form or tone from the whole.

Comparing Correa’s work to this tradition that he was trained in, we see fundamental
continuities and contrasts emerging together. Correa’s vocabulary of forms, and his
compositional grammar are modernist (as is his frequently critical restructuring of the

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functional brief that he receives from clients). Thus a large number of his compositions
are carefully totalized, though in a very different way every time. A simple overarching
plan or sculptural form usually holds a range of recesses (as at Kanchanjanga as well as
Vidhan Bhavan) or projections from that overall form. Naturally, the ‘wrap wall’ is a
common device in mid career projects like Inter University Centre for Astrophysics and
Astronomy (IUCAA), Pune as well as the most recent Champalimaud Centre, Lisbon. In
both projects the horizontal sprawl of the buildings is gathered into a smooth exterior
form by a wall that also encloses differently shaped open spaces, as it travels around the
building.

Even as he gathers parts of buildings into a modernist whole, Correa also charts a path
that challenges some of the central assumptions of the modernism he inherited. Perhaps
the most remarkable divergence from the ideal of the precious modernist object is the
commitment to the ideal of the non-building. That divergence is expressed in the
language of modernism, and even builds on Le Corbusier’s innovations. But it is a crucial
divergence, a contrary current even. The canonical modernist architectural object does
not seek self-cancellation of the sort implied in the limit condition that the non-building
gestures towards.

Two things mark Correa’s pursuit of the non-building. First, it is not a doctrinaire pursuit.
As mentioned earlier, across his non-buildings, there is a variable interplay with the
opposed modernist idea of the enigmatic monument, which makes for stimulating
architectural experiences. Secondly, Correa has shown that non-buildings can be
incarnated in very different morphological and experiential personalities. There are at
least three very different ways in which he has formalized the ideal of the non-building
across major works.

Kasturba Gandhi Samadhi, Pune, a memorial to Gandhiji’s wife, designed in the early
1960s, and the later Bharat Bhavan (1979-84) by the lakeside in Bhopal, embody the
almost thorough non-building, one that is completely pushed underground. In both we
experience the building as a hard, geometric landscape we walk over. In both we enter at
a height and make our way down towards intimate spaces. In both we are conscious not
so much of active sculptural form, but of being urged on and down an architectural
landscape. At the memorial, we progress more purposefully towards a moment of release:
a generous enclosed garden with the memorial, meditative but not self-serious. At Bharat
Bhavan we descend into a system of three courts, which lead to museums, a theatre and
art studios. Alternatively, from the entrance itself we can walk the roofscape and reach
the lake. The entire building has disappeared and become a public promenade.

The National Crafts Museum, New Delhi, connects to a much more traditional model of
the non-building: that of a sprawling house with a series of courtyards that reveals little
of its scale or form to the street. All that is visible of the museum campus from the street
is a low wall with a roofed entrance door. As we walk the memorable alternation of daylit
and shaded spaces, there is no moment at which a convex architectural form stands apart
from us. Instead we are always ‘inside’ even in the open space leading to the bazaar
outside the museum section. Once inside the museum section we find ourselves embraced

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by one court, nudged along by the shaded passages, and pulled ahead by pools of daylight
in the courtyards ahead. If at Bharat Bhavan the pervasive experience is of being in an
open landscape, here we are forever in a daylit inside. The modernist architectural object
in open space is not available for encounter.

Kala Akademi provides a third variety of the non-building experience. It is not a self-
evident non-building, since it enjoys an emphatic presence on the street because of the
double-storey ‘veranda-to-the-city’ that the roof level pergola forms. However, in
concept the building is fundamentally a kind of non-building. If at Bharat Bhavan the
‘building’ is pushed underground in principle, at Kala Akademi it is held aloft and all the
public life of the institution is staged in its shade. Once inside, we realize that the mass of
the building gets out of the way of the walker who would wander from the street straight
through the building to the river Mandovi beside which the institution stands. The raison
d’etre of the design is to provide shelter (as well as tea and samosas at the canteen along
the way) to this welcome wanderer.

Space as architectural substance

Correa’s committed explorations of the very opposite quality of the monumental leads me
to believe that his is an architecture primarily of space, in spite of its often striking
sculptural, chromatic and compositional qualities. One small indicator of the
predominance of spatial concerns in his work is the fact that the large, relatively
monumental void is perhaps his most enduring gesture of emphasis visible on the exterior
of buildings. This is significant. For Correa appears to trust an absence most to register
his building’s presence.

As mentioned, Kala Akademi’s relative monumentality on the street is secured not by a

large and dominant mass but by an inviting, exhilarating space. As it is at the LIC Centre
in Mauritius, or the fluidly sculptural MRF corporate office in Chennai. At the British
Deputy High Commission, New Delhi, the framed void (with its dramatic mural by
Howard Hodgkins) is the architecture, at least for the street. A slightly different kind of
void is formed out of pergola-covered terraces at different heights in the Permanent
Mission of India to the UN in mid-town Manhattan. The tall, slender, stepped mass,
deftly wedged into a crevice between tall buildings, is capped by a void at every stage.
The void at the top is open in four directions and produces a light but emphatic
termination that ushers the sky into the perceived mass of the building. The grace of the
vertical termination at the Permanent Mission derives from its paradoxical nature. An
empty cube in principle, this void simultaneously affirms as well as undercuts the solidity
of the tower it sits within. Defined delicately but surely by its columns and the pergola,
the well formed void mediates between the solidity of built form and the emptiness of
sky.

The well formed void is an intriguing and revealing visual paradox central to our
experience of Correa’s architecture. Walking through a Correa building, I have often had

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the uncanny feeling that what is clearly an empty space is also a very definite form.
Ordinary experience allows us to perceive the forms that solids take. But rarely do we see
the obverse of that solidity in the voids that lie at the heart of architecture. Habit lets us
assume that absence of matter is absence of form. But I have repeatedly sensed the
paradoxical presence of a definite form in an absence of matter at Bharat Bhavan, the
forecourt of the JNIDB, Hyderabad, and certainly at the central courtyard of the Jawahar
Kala Kendra, Jaipur (though, strangely, not in courtyards of other buildings).

But a more temporal and directly habitational phenomenon secures my belief that Correa
is fundamentally an architect of space (and even of time). Correa actually designs for the
moving inhabitant. He does not design for the static eye. This brings us back to the
tension between the monument and the non-building. Don’t get me wrong. Correa
certainly designs for the static eye too, and his architecture is clearly photogenic. But as
he has shown in a range of non-buildings where there is no simple drama for the eye, it is
really the experience of moving through that is at the core of his concerns. Not
surprisingly, he has often mentioned ‘the ritualistic pathway’ of traditional Indian
architecture as a point of inspiration (though it is perhaps the spontaneous, unritualistic
wanderer he seems to design for more often!). Walking through his buildings, we begin
to appreciate the creativity and commitment with which he redeploys that principle in his
very modern work.

It is the inhabitant who must activate the spatial theatricality of Correa’s buildings. This
is perhaps true of all good architecture. But it is especially true of Correa’s. At the Brain
and Cognitive Sciences Centre of MIT, Cambridge built in 2007, I suddenly realized
Correa’s skill at orchestrating movement. At the heart of this very simple building is a
large atrium a flight of steps up from the entrance lobby. An attractive staircase flanks
one side of the atrium. I found myself bounding up the staircase only to realize soon, that
without noticing it, I had already climbed four or five storeys, pulled by the spatial
promises of the design. As in many other Correa buildings, the subtle spatial drama I had
experienced in entering the building had already set up a series of expectations that led
me up the atrium staircase at the end of a tiring day.

Identity and architecture

I shall end by gesturing briefly and indirectly towards the implications of the discussion
so far for the issue of cultural identity in architecture. That is often the main lens through
which the work of postcolonial Indian modernists is approached in most arts. I alluded at
the beginning to a tension between Correa’s modernist training and sensibilities and his
personal understanding of how architecture receives dwelling traditionally in India. I
believe that Correa’s work, like that of his Indian peers, Balkrishna Doshi, Joseph Stein,
Anant Raje and Raj Rewal, has staged a valuable struggle between these apparently
contradictory forces. What distinguishes Correa’s work in this context is the fact that he
both resolves and sustains the conflict in his buildings.

The various tensions are not completely resolved or sublimated, but they do not surge
about uneasily either. In fact, Correa often deliberately stages new tensions, perhaps as

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proxies for other more profound unanswerables. Thus we have the astonishing back and
forth between real and surreal spaces that many of his murals in public and private spaces
set off. At other times a rhetorical device like the wrap wall disciplines certain internal
contradictions simply by its totalizing action as at the Vidhan Bhavan, Bhopal. Correa’s
realized designs often bespeak an elegant and reassuring finality, that strangely, also lets
you glimpse the many contrary pulls that the smallest personal decisions must always
negotiate. Even though a public utterance, architecture is a personal art, as many have
observed. In Correa’s best work then, we may recognise a hybridity at the level of
personal intention, that presents one very accurate reflection of what it means to build
and dwell in modern India.

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