The Politics of Representation: Charles Correa

The Politics of Representation: Charles Correa
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.

The drawings appearing in the Charles Correa monograph, often understood to be drawn by the architect himself.

The actual hand drawing of Correa.

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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.

Lokmanya Tilak Terminus / New Wing

I know - it opened some time back - so it's hardly "new". But it was quite new for me. And I was pleasantly elated with the building, particularly with its scale and the quality of light. For a change, it did not have bulky over designed columns and a heavy roof. The barrel vaults gave it a sense of dynamism and airy-ness.

The different facilities were spaced decently well. The building was perfectly functional, had a clear diagram. Not glitzy, no patterning, not into frills, I felt it was after a long time I felt nice about a public building in Mumbai.

Any help on who designed it?

Young Subcontinent

I have been writing reviews of artists' work shown as a part of the Young Subcontinent Project, curated by Riyas Komu in Goa for the Serendipity Arts Festival 2016. 

I invite all the readers here to explore the above writings and artworks on www.youngsubcontinent.blogspot.com

The Split Universe / Review of Baiju Parthan's work

Published in Art India, Dec. 2016

The Split Universe

Anuj Daga floats through Baiju Parthan’s world where the natural, the geometrical and the digital are juxtaposed together.


It is difficult to decipher if Necessary Illusions by Baiju Parthan from the 14th of September to the 5th of November at Art Musings, Mumbai, emphasizes or dissolves the split between art and science – a notion that has been carried from the period of the Enlightenment. Historians of science have debated about the way in which artistic versus scientific approaches (which actually carried different semantic charges then) have come to influence the cultural understanding of objects around us. Eric Schatzberg, a scholar at the Department of the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin, argues (1) that broader meanings of art and its centrality to generating knowledge about objects by operating upon them were displaced into the ‘technological’ narrative of science (2) with the onset of industrialisation. Eventually, such a categorization created a divide between the mind and the hand, thinking and making. Parthan’s acrylics on canvas and lenticular prints compel us to ponder upon this illusory divide between the arts and the sciences by merging different realities.

Today, these multiple realities about a singular object are easily recorded, preserved and accumulated as ‘Big Data’ that contain complex information about objects beyond what the human mind or even computers can process at once. By merely juxtaposing several structures of knowledge – chemical, structural, geospatial, geometrical, astronomical and digital – Parthan evokes the different frequencies and densities in which the world may have been crystallized into varied physical forms. For example, in the painting Meta-Flora, a flower is presented in its range of readings – the softness of petals, their ocular perception, the wireframe construct of their curve, the molecular structure that lends them colour and smell, their symbolic appropriations, all become visible on a single canvas. In a similar manner, in yet another painting Engineered Fruit (Disrupterr), the motif of a pear is blown up but caged within its geometrical formation, scaled against the cartography of the sky, immediately drawing astronomical connections between the two: the shape of the space we inhabit and the shape of the things we consume. These hand-painted imageries immediately bring us closer to the varied experiments of the naturalists, botanists, astronomers, cartographers and enthusiasts dedicated to deciphering the natural world. The pursuit of the design of nature, which was ‘purist’ in the works of earlier artists, has become multilayered in the work of the artist today.

Parthan further makes the art-science discourse more contemporary through his lenticular experiments in the second section of the show. Here, we encounter semi-animated images of the pear dissolving into words that become elastic, stretching their own meanings. As one shifts the position of viewing, the raw fruit ripens and diffracts into its own existential politics. The words seen through the moving gaze refer to the embeddedness of the consumable object within larger networks of trade, economics, production and biomorphics, eventually making us wonder if it even belongs to the natural world. Hung from the walls as free-falling objects, the pear parts that appear and disappear to the moving body, play between the actual and the imaginary – making the ghost of the real a necessary illusion. In another instance, one is pushed to believe that the data-drowned objects of today are caught up in their own evolutionary time – an anomalous raw-ripe maturity. Classification tables now morph objects and their multiple identities, bringing us to a space of ambiguity where ‘things’ have as much agency as humans may have once had. The lenticular layers of these panels present the dangers and depths of data pools within which our lives are suspended.

In his last set, Parthan reimagines living in a phenomenally restructured world, where all objects are packets of information. Parthan’s constructions emphasize our uncanny navigation through the everyday as insecure datascapes. Hovering objects like aeroplanes, gas balloons or even sharks over ordinary urban settings evoke an atmosphere of suspicion due to over-indulgence in information practices. However, in some instances, these motifs seem too literal vis-a-vis their historical referents. The equation of floating sharks to terrorists over the Gateway of India seems too direct a reference to the 2008 attacks in Mumbai. On the other hand, taxis levitating through balloons at the Victoria Train Terminus confuse: does the work depict a flight into history or the future? While it recalls Rene Magritte’s Golconda that depicts scenes of ‘raining men’, the work does not have a strong surreal impact. Nevertheless, the technique engages the viewer in a play of perception – where each eye possibly beholds a relevant scientific reality. Parthan’s artistic renderings thus enable every viewer to participate in his own process of decoding the world and uncovering a certain truth.


End-notes

1) See Schatzberg Eric’s “From Art to Applied Science” in Isis, Vol. 103, No. 3, September 2012, pgs. 555-563.

2) Earlier, it was held that art is directed toward action, science toward contemplation.




1) Baiju Parthan. Meta-Flora. Acrylic on canvas. 48” x 96”. 2016. Image courtesy the artist and Art Musings.

Other Images

Laurie Baker Works

I haven't invested enough in studying Laurie Baker, until now. Perhaps his work suffers over-identification by the badge of architects who practice "sustainable architecture" today. To ask whether Baker really was practicing sustainability may be a tricky question. After all, much of his work uses local material, climatic responses and immense contextuality to their sites. Yet, his work doesn't end up like the vernacular - one sees bold experiments in form, as well as material technique. Swirling curves in brick, flowing slabs of concrete, porous walls with intricate lattice jalis - don't these convey a compulsive spirit of the modern? Often these gestures get misread as vernacular. Enthusiasts of sustainable practice consistently fail to acknowledge the formal experiments of Baker, over emphasizing upon the cost effectiveness of building technique.

Baker wrote numerous books on cost-effective construction techniques. Available to the common man easily, he often reduced for people building techniques almost like applicable formulae. This has become the primary mode in which we consume, understand and remember Baker today. While written as mere essentials of construction process, he never fell in the formulaic trap, constantly innovating and critically evolving his material conception of space. This fundamental split in the way we consume versus experience Baker's architecture has made us categorically leave out Baker in the mainstream modern architectural discourse. Further, in framing his buildings merely as "cost-effective" or "sustainable", we have foreshadowed the experiential aspects of his buildings to a large extent, reducing our focus merely to his use of material and techniques.

We are introduced to an extensive range of methods in which a set of bricks can be put together in moving through Baker's buildings. The manner in which surfacial textures are created merely by a variation in the way brick is twisted/moved and re-placed over one another opens up worlds of experiences (ref: The Smooth and the Striated, Gilles Deleuze). In structure and skin, the brick forever reveals itself in new ways. Occasionally contrasted with concrete, his buildings cover the entire spectrum from smooth to coarse - invoking a phenomenal experience. One wonders how constraints of costs and resource, within a given social context, can bring about such an interesting phenomenological restructuring of architecture through a material that is otherwise constructs the mundane.

It is almost reductive of Baker, at various instances, to justify these diverse culturally multidimensional solutions as merely functions of economy or affordability. To make one's dynamic architecture be understood as so utilitarian seems to me an over-rational narrative that he may have prepared as a dose for political consumption of bureaucrats and people with low design consciousness. Was Baker doing so to "sell" his ideas? Rather, it was his challenge to make his design narrative so convenient to as to be accessible to common man. Perhaps he anticipated a possibility where the common man could participate in appreciating design if its language became more accessible.

Was poetry not appreciated enough in Baker's work environment for him to express in a narrative exciting beyond the utilitarian? His works exemplify poetics of space in the minute details and sensitivity to site. Without a doubt, Baker's sites did much for him - he was intelligent enough to locate his projects (in many instances) letting the landscape in the building tactfully.  Baker's forms and spatialities do not speak of poverty. They are full of life and longing in their attention to human scale, gesture, all rolled into a minimal aesthetic. To a large extent, Baker begins to answer what Kahn asks profoundly "What does the brick want to be?" What architectural questions did Baker want to pose through his forms? What experiential structure did he create through his architectural endavour? What phenomenological openings do Baker's project invoke? These are questions that remain uninitiated in the scholarship on Laurie Baker by far.

Life-Review

Over the last few months, I have been extremely busy with SEA, a curatorial project I was working on with Riyas Komu, the Kochi Biennale and some writing. In between all of that, several other things were going on. One, for example was our study trip to Kerala, which I would have loved to write about. We visited the buildings of Laurie Baker, and later spent four days documenting Kochi. Additionally, after coming back, we had to get on to assisting the students with preparing drawings and artworks for the Kochi. And immediately following that was the Architectural Design studio for the same class (second year). Running around all of this, my body gave up to dengue, which kept me bedridden for about 2 weeks, and weak for around four.

Once I regained my strength, I had to get back to a lot of pending work. All the above things, but more importantly, by this time, the curatorial project 'Young Subcontinent' had begun to take momentum, and it demanded attention as much as the Kochi student biennale submission. It was a challenging time - for a lot had to be accomplished simultaneously. Having gone through it, I feel relieved.

In the next few posts, I will try to elaborate upon several distinct episodes listed below:
1. The Kerala Trip
2. The Kochi Student Biennale
3. The Young Subcontinent Project

I am not sure if I will be able to write enough - for now much has become distant, and will take up a reflective tone, losing the immediacy of thought. Primarily, writing has now taken a different seat in the scheme of things I am doing, making this blog suffer. I have produced writings for several platforms other than the blog, that may not find their way here due to confidentiality and other such issues. However, as time comes, people will be able to read me over more places. For example, I have written a shortened piece for the IES magazine Le E'spirit, along with a review of Baiju Parthan's show at Art Musings - for Art India. At the same time, I was writing several concept notes for projects for the Young Subcontinent Projects. Another abstract for a conference on Film and Architecture that I wrote was selected for a university in Australia - something I couldnot attend due to funding issues.

The SEA newsletter 3 was released, which demanded some copyediting. Many other ideas were noted, now lying in various diaries. I designed a full fleged catalogue for the Kochi Student Biennale titled "What is a Home?" Besides all of this, the amount of communication letters that I have written over the last few months is indefatigable. I hope all of this will culminate into something much more worthwhile, that which will also keep the blog going.

The State of Architecture: A Critical Review

Published in Art India, September 2016

Beyond Bricks, Mortar and Concrete

Anuj Daga dwells critically on a show that tries to map the state of the built environment in India.

“What do we exactly exhibit when we exhibit architecture: should we be satisfied to exhibit photographs of buildings and sites, or should we aim to put whole buildings or, if that is not possible, fragments and models of them on display?” These preliminary questions from the symposium ‘Exhibiting Architecture: A Paradox’[i] can appropriately initiate a discussion into the curation, agency and politics of The State of Architecture (SOA) exhibition at the NGMA, Mumbai. Organized along with talks, allied exhibitions and art events spread over three months, SOA attempted to draw the attention of the public to ‘practices and processes of architecture’ in India. To elaborate upon the initial inquiry for SOA, one may pose further, what is the experience of time characterized by technology, media and global flows? How does it touch ground and manifest as architecture in a country as diverse as India? How must it be artistically displayed for a critical review within the space of a gallery through the medium of an exhibition?

The State of Architecture, an Urban Design Research Institute project, curated by Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote and Kaiwan Mehta, from the 6th of January to the 20th of March, is notably the largest exhibition on architecture in India after Vistara that was curated by Charles Correa in 1986. While Vistara attempted to frame a pan-Indian identity unearthing the ancient mandala diagrams and traditional building methods over centuries, SOA establishes its orientation in the modern architectural profession which began as a colonial enterprise. It serves as a resourceful guide for young architecture students and aspirants – a convenient pedagogical tool to expose the lay audience to significant architectural development and production in the country over the last 65 years. Marking Independence, the Emergency of 1975 and the economic Liberalization of 1991 as the key moments in the history of India, the curators lay out the entire exhibition as a timeline of architectural and political events within the country.

One is introduced to the current state of affairs in architecture at the entrance level. A large infographic translates data collected from the Council of Architecture records and other surveys to cull out seemingly urgent questions thrown all over the exhibition space: Why is there a low architect-public ratio? Why are few women architects practising? Why have architects become life-style designers? Does architecture matter? Do you need a degree to be an architect? Does capital dictate design? A selection of popular and frequently referred books are laid out on a long table that include monographs, surveys, reflections and memoirs, particularly on architecture in India. The number of books in this collection alarms us – there is an urgent need for a deeper discourse on architecture in India. Alongside is a wallpaper of architectural magazine issue covers. A comment on the quality of architectural journalism or reportage in India would help the thinking community take directed action.

The bulk of the exhibition, as we encounter in the split levels of the NGMA, is framed through canonized images pulled out of a handful of monographs of Indian master architects leaving behind the geo-political aspects of their work. This section talks about Nation-building Experiments, presenting a panorama of new cities, institutions and housing projects that were built under state patronage over the 30 years after independence. Most of these projects, as we may infer from the exhibition, were executed by a handful of architects – Charles Correa, B. V. Doshi, Achyut Kanvinde, Raj Rewal, I. M. Kadri, Habib Rahman and a few others. One wonders how the vast architectural landscape of India become available to a select set of architects. How did they gain credibility? Further, how did these architects interact with political power in deploying their works in different geographies? The curators state that the project of national identity was “renounced” by architects over the late 1970s loosening their modernist ideals to accommodate regional identities within their works. Whether such a move was a result of the shift in the state’s political ideology, or the architects’ struggle to address issues closer to diverse conditions, or a conscious attempt to align with the (popular) ideology of critical regionalism that emerged internationally as a resistance to the banal post-modern style, are questions not directly addressed, but bring out the relationship between how built form is intertwined within a large set of political forces.

Attention given to architects like Charles Correa, B. V. Doshi, Raj Rewal, among others, is indeed noteworthy. However, to be sure, these architects do not adequately frame the picture of the contemporary state of architecture in the country. Overshadowed by the above, a whole wave of architects mediating India’s transition into the corporate landscape have found no adequate space for discussion within the curators’ schema. For example, architect Hafeez Contractor, the most recent Padma Bhushan awardee, whose commercial architectural practice typifies much of the architectural production in the country hasn’t been a part of any serious discussion. Contractor’s practice is one of the first to crudely synthesize the inundation of global capital, imagery and ideas within our built environment over and after the period of liberalization, giving architecture a bold consumerist dimension. Many younger practitioners, those ideologically lost somewhere between Correa and Contractor, weren’t a part of any panel discussion.

The rotunda wall at the uppermost level was playfully animated – swelling and shrinking to reveal and hide projects essentially executed after economic liberalization in its folding skin. These are projects that disregard, rather, challenge our notions of indigenous architectural aesthetics. The contemporary projects displayed right under the dome of the NGMA begged for a sharper curatorial intervention – spatially as well as organizationally. In laying out panels orthogonally in four quadrants of the circular floor under the hemisphere, the exhibition missed the opportunity of harnessing the volumetric geography of the rotunda to spatially evoke the experience of architecture as a global product. On the other hand, it was perplexing to see a café besides a capitol, a school besides a factory, a hospital besides a house – losing the viewer in projects with disparate descriptions, situated in diverse geographies. The selection of projects clearly suggests an imbalance, only representing a handful of cities that have been frequently discussed over publishing platforms in recent times. It is here that the exhibition could have offered new conceptual categories to read and analyze emerging hybrid architecture that is otherwise lumped as ‘plural’. Lacking actual fieldwork, SOA hardly offered insights into aspects like the diversification of the profession, the remoulding of the architect’s identity or even the reconstitution of architectural practice in a globalized environment. A longer, sustained investigation would have revealed the specificities of reception of global currents by often under-represented states of the central, north-eastern and eastern belts of India.

The State of Architecture exhibition did not sufficiently engage with the questions I raised at the beginning of the review. It is unfortunate that the curators could not bring in even a single architectural model to the gallery. Rather, the only object that the gallery boasted was a copy of the life-size Manusha icon – that which the viewer was greeted with in the 1986 Vistara exhibition. Its inclusion in the present exhibition was merely fed by nostalgia. The conventional display of images within one of the most spatially exciting galleries of Mumbai seemed undemonstrative. To be sure, the only moving images (in the age of digital media that we live in) were a couple of films of/by Charles Correa, nothing which explored the (contemporary) state of architecture in India. With such a limited collection, its non-polemical presentation and frail engagement with multimedia or multidisciplinary inquiries, should one be satisfied by the overall experience of the exhibition?

It is indeed difficult to map the state of the contemporary built environment for a country as diverse as India with each state having its own political tectonics. However, can the questions asked for the built environment produced by a country of 1.2 billion be as homogenous? A more culturally relevant question to ask would be similar to that which is often posed in the rejection of the use of the term ‘Bollywood’ by many Hindi film actors and scholars. Brushing aside the downgraded labelling of ‘Bollywood’ as a portmanteau of ‘Bombay’ and ‘Hollywood’, they maintain that while the tools for producing films were received by India from the West, the Hindi film industry developed its own unique method of musical-narrative sequences in their story-telling. In this vein, it would be worthwhile to initiate an enquiry into the sense we have made of ‘architecture’, over the years post-Independence. How, and to what extent, have we come to redefine our values, and whether or not we are able to express them successfully within our built environments? This would give an opportunity for the object of architecture to become self-critical, contemplative and meaningful.

Much of the discussions in all fields, including architecture, are becoming highly technocratic, foreclosing any give-and-take about issues of culture and philosophy, thinking and making, living and the self. If understood as an act of creative production, this exhibition falls short in bringing forth any discussion on the politics of design in the execution of its material. Architects’ materials today have reduced to brick, mortar and concrete – no longer does poetry, literature, music or philosophy come to shape the built environment. Likewise, drowned in mere visuals, SOA fails to provoke the viewer into thinking deeply about the meaning of her surroundings. The incapacity of many architects to absorb, interpret, critically reflect and translate the cultural zeitgeist of the country in their works characterizes both – the state of architecture in India as well as the exhibition of the state of architecture in India.

End-Note

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[i] “Exhibiting Architecture: A Paradox”, Concept note from the symposium held at Yale School of Architecture, 2013.