The Politics of Representation: Charles Correa
Anuj Daga
For IES College of Architecture’s Annual Magazine ‘L’espirit’, 2016
Architect Charles Correa’s monograph published in 1996 was one of the most worn out books in the library of Academy of Architecture, Mumbai where I studied. Despite the fact that it was on permanent reserve at the school library it was referred by students far too frequently; to an extent that it’s binding had gone loose. The dismal condition of this book was inevitable given students’ keen interest in Correa’s works. At the same time, it bears witness to the fact that Charles Correa was, and still remains the most celebrated architect in India. Many of the students would always skip the introductory essay authored by historian Kenneth Frampton, or the one by Correa himself that followed. Instead, we would quickly move on to study the beautifully hand rendered building drawings of his projects. Importantly, these plans and sections were drawn by hand, which we believed were prepared by the architect himself. The style of these drawings was instinctively emulated by many of us into our own studio presentations, as for most of us (like students studying architecture in India even today), such illustrative drawing style became synonymous in conveying a certain idea of rootedness, perhaps even “Indian-ness” in design.
While we had no direct access to meet or talk to Correa, we primarily understood his architecture through the representations of built works published in his books. Correa’s approach of using local vernacular idioms in his building responses like the image appearing on the cover page of his monograph, together with the hand-borne aesthetic character of the representations published within it convinced us about those drawings too, to be prepared by him. Through the process of practicing what we assumed his style of drawing, we even hoped to acquire or appropriate an architectural sensibility of the aging Master, and thus to continue his legacy.
Anuj Daga
For IES College of Architecture’s Annual Magazine ‘L’espirit’, 2016
 |
| Cover page of Charles Correa's monograph |
Architect Charles Correa’s monograph published in 1996 was one of the most worn out books in the library of Academy of Architecture, Mumbai where I studied. Despite the fact that it was on permanent reserve at the school library it was referred by students far too frequently; to an extent that it’s binding had gone loose. The dismal condition of this book was inevitable given students’ keen interest in Correa’s works. At the same time, it bears witness to the fact that Charles Correa was, and still remains the most celebrated architect in India. Many of the students would always skip the introductory essay authored by historian Kenneth Frampton, or the one by Correa himself that followed. Instead, we would quickly move on to study the beautifully hand rendered building drawings of his projects. Importantly, these plans and sections were drawn by hand, which we believed were prepared by the architect himself. The style of these drawings was instinctively emulated by many of us into our own studio presentations, as for most of us (like students studying architecture in India even today), such illustrative drawing style became synonymous in conveying a certain idea of rootedness, perhaps even “Indian-ness” in design.
While we had no direct access to meet or talk to Correa, we primarily understood his architecture through the representations of built works published in his books. Correa’s approach of using local vernacular idioms in his building responses like the image appearing on the cover page of his monograph, together with the hand-borne aesthetic character of the representations published within it convinced us about those drawings too, to be prepared by him. Through the process of practicing what we assumed his style of drawing, we even hoped to acquire or appropriate an architectural sensibility of the aging Master, and thus to continue his legacy.
When Charles Correa planned to retire from architectural practice by the age of 82 in the year 2012, he decided to donate his entire archive of drawings, photographs, letters, models and list of published works to the RIBA in London. I was fortunate enough to be a part of this massive archiving project at the office of Charles Correa, which was carried out with the help of his office employees. It gave me an opportunity to observe closely the nature of Correa’s practice – the work of a figure we revered and the drawings from the monograph of whom we almost consumed invariably. To my surprise, I could not locate any drawings in his archive that looked like the ones in his monograph. In fact, I discovered through the co-employees at his office that Correa hardly preserved the process drawings he made for his own buildings. In addition, his original drawing style that I observed being an archivist at his office was quite different to those predominantly occurring in his monograph – one with uncontrolled, uninhibited swiping strokes instead of the slow, undulating ones that we had learned to emulate based on the published monograph. It is here that I came to question for the first time: who made those drawings for Correa’s monograph and why were they rendered differently from Correa’s own style? And how, in this situation, was a peculiar kind of representation technique chosen?
The works of Charles Correa often become a comfortable and pleasing aesthetic to settle for an “Indian” response in built form. They were also backed by the geometric diagrams introduced in the Vistara exhibition, as depicted in his monograph. We seldom looked beyond the Correa’s works as represented in his monograph to decipher the political and geographical forces that shaped his buildings. After detailed research in looking into Correa’s career, his architecture appears to be much more complex and ambiguous than what we as students simply accepted as Indian. I have come to realize that the imagination of Correa’s ‘India’ is shaped by, or even shaped for a number of political and geographical factors that transgress national boundaries.
To cut short to the untold story of the drawings - the sketchy, undulating drawing lines were chosen as a means of reinforcing the Indian identity in Correa’s works – they not only relate to the older Indian artistic representations but also the traditional village building forms made out of hand-plastered mud could never be a perfectly straight line. These practices that imparted an innate visual character to the built forms, in Correa’s mind, became Indian. I got to confirm this while working at his office in a candid conversation over lunch one day when Correa went on to say, “Even the Indian khadi fabric looks beautiful because it does not form clean straight lines. The undulating warps and wefts give character to the cloth, it echoes our culture.”[1] In the pursuit of translating this culture into his architectural representation, Correa commissioned employees from his office to reproduce the drawings by tracing over plans and sections technically made by drawing instruments or computer softwares to give an effect that not only allowed a simpler reading, but also strongly relate to the above-discovered theme of the rural and minimal, in other words “Indian.”
Harshraj Mane, one of the contributors of such drawings explains what he learnt under the guidance of the master architect. In a sense of repeating the master, he explained, “When you have to re-draw and abstract the design to re-present it, you focus your mind on the essence of the design - it is planning, navigation, proportions, shadow pattern and then accordingly make the drawing. Also there were parallel artists like Mario Miranda, R K Laxman, warli painting style, to draw influence from.”[2] The “essence” that Harshraj points out is certainly the notion of Indian that was coined in Correa’s mind after the Vistara exhibition – that which were located in traditional art forms and heritage of India. This is precisely the reason why Correa’s own style of drawing – the free flowing quick strokes unlike the poised illustrations in the monograph, that I noticed when I saw him in action while drawing in his office were not used throughout this publication. As we may now reason, in Correa’s own imagination his drawings were insufficient in conveying the spirit of Indian that was originally informed and established by the artistic building forms included in the Vistara exhibition. The building drawings thus reproduced in the form of undulating hand drawn sketches in the monograph, visually perceived like the rustic, unfinished aesthetic of traditional art forms in India undoubtedly made the works appear more rooted in the place.
In the light of the above study, Correa’s ability to steer the reception of his work as extremely relevant for national as well as international audiences at the same time is worth noting. It is this aspect of being able to mould complex political and geographical realities that have emerged as the highlight of Correa’s practice – one that must be remembered while evaluating contemporary architecture in India.
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ENDNOTES
[1]I quote this from my personal conversation with Charles Correa while working at his office. Mr. Correa was referring to the hand-plastered walls of villages that do not have machine-finished crisp edges, instead evoke a sense of human involvement, when he stated his impression about the Indian fabric.
[2]E-mail interview with Harshraj Mane, former employee at Charles Correa Associates.
Mario Miranda was a famous Indian cartoonist based in Goa; R K Laxman is a well known illustrator and cartoonist from Mysore, India and warli paintings are folk paintings made by a tribal settlement in Maharashtra called “Warlis.” These drawings are illustrative renderings of everyday life drawn using white paste prepared from crushed rice.
The works of Charles Correa often become a comfortable and pleasing aesthetic to settle for an “Indian” response in built form. They were also backed by the geometric diagrams introduced in the Vistara exhibition, as depicted in his monograph. We seldom looked beyond the Correa’s works as represented in his monograph to decipher the political and geographical forces that shaped his buildings. After detailed research in looking into Correa’s career, his architecture appears to be much more complex and ambiguous than what we as students simply accepted as Indian. I have come to realize that the imagination of Correa’s ‘India’ is shaped by, or even shaped for a number of political and geographical factors that transgress national boundaries.
To cut short to the untold story of the drawings - the sketchy, undulating drawing lines were chosen as a means of reinforcing the Indian identity in Correa’s works – they not only relate to the older Indian artistic representations but also the traditional village building forms made out of hand-plastered mud could never be a perfectly straight line. These practices that imparted an innate visual character to the built forms, in Correa’s mind, became Indian. I got to confirm this while working at his office in a candid conversation over lunch one day when Correa went on to say, “Even the Indian khadi fabric looks beautiful because it does not form clean straight lines. The undulating warps and wefts give character to the cloth, it echoes our culture.”[1] In the pursuit of translating this culture into his architectural representation, Correa commissioned employees from his office to reproduce the drawings by tracing over plans and sections technically made by drawing instruments or computer softwares to give an effect that not only allowed a simpler reading, but also strongly relate to the above-discovered theme of the rural and minimal, in other words “Indian.”
Harshraj Mane, one of the contributors of such drawings explains what he learnt under the guidance of the master architect. In a sense of repeating the master, he explained, “When you have to re-draw and abstract the design to re-present it, you focus your mind on the essence of the design - it is planning, navigation, proportions, shadow pattern and then accordingly make the drawing. Also there were parallel artists like Mario Miranda, R K Laxman, warli painting style, to draw influence from.”[2] The “essence” that Harshraj points out is certainly the notion of Indian that was coined in Correa’s mind after the Vistara exhibition – that which were located in traditional art forms and heritage of India. This is precisely the reason why Correa’s own style of drawing – the free flowing quick strokes unlike the poised illustrations in the monograph, that I noticed when I saw him in action while drawing in his office were not used throughout this publication. As we may now reason, in Correa’s own imagination his drawings were insufficient in conveying the spirit of Indian that was originally informed and established by the artistic building forms included in the Vistara exhibition. The building drawings thus reproduced in the form of undulating hand drawn sketches in the monograph, visually perceived like the rustic, unfinished aesthetic of traditional art forms in India undoubtedly made the works appear more rooted in the place.
In the light of the above study, Correa’s ability to steer the reception of his work as extremely relevant for national as well as international audiences at the same time is worth noting. It is this aspect of being able to mould complex political and geographical realities that have emerged as the highlight of Correa’s practice – one that must be remembered while evaluating contemporary architecture in India.
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ENDNOTES
[1]I quote this from my personal conversation with Charles Correa while working at his office. Mr. Correa was referring to the hand-plastered walls of villages that do not have machine-finished crisp edges, instead evoke a sense of human involvement, when he stated his impression about the Indian fabric.
[2]E-mail interview with Harshraj Mane, former employee at Charles Correa Associates.
Mario Miranda was a famous Indian cartoonist based in Goa; R K Laxman is a well known illustrator and cartoonist from Mysore, India and warli paintings are folk paintings made by a tribal settlement in Maharashtra called “Warlis.” These drawings are illustrative renderings of everyday life drawn using white paste prepared from crushed rice.
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NOTE:
This is a short extract of a chapter for my master's thesis "In the Place of Images" submitted to the Yale School of Architecture, USA, 2014, towards the completion of Master of Environmental Design program. The original chapter investigates the geopolitics of Charles Correa's practice over his architectural career.
NOTE:
This is a short extract of a chapter for my master's thesis "In the Place of Images" submitted to the Yale School of Architecture, USA, 2014, towards the completion of Master of Environmental Design program. The original chapter investigates the geopolitics of Charles Correa's practice over his architectural career.
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