Charles Correa’s greatest?

Glad to see ‘Sea of Poppies’ on the Harvard list.
I am also flattered at the attention you paid to the comment and how you took it forward.
Gehry is no doubt a pioneer (sadly, I have not seen any of his buildings).

But Correa is a living presence in Delhi where I live and his red LIC building looms over Connaught Place, as does the British Council.
I made me think of the architect a different sort of artist. What he or she makes cannot be avoided or brushed aside unlike a musical composition, film, painting, dance or book.

Like we cannot brush aside the structure (we cannot even avoid taking the road) or not see it, and if it is a public utility (hospital or university) or a commercial structure, we cannot even avoid using it. One hates it, but one has to use it. But if one likes it, the beauty, the utility gives the person happiness.

So whatever an architect creates goes into public domain instantly, it in fact begins to define public domain (like in the case of the Stein’s India Habitat Centre or Connaught Place). So nothing the architect does can ever be personal, I feel, except for his own house, perhaps, which too is imitated, which brings us back to the questionable picture of the architect in Zizek’s favourite film ‘The Fountainhead’.

So the architect is a public figure– whether he likes it or not. If people feel angry at what he has created since they are now forced to see it everyday and even use it, the architect is held responsible. Sadly in India, the architect is not a public figure. Few in my office know Correa.

Few know or care that the symbols of India’s dizzying growth– the entire glass and steel edifice of the DLF, or Infosys (a representative of the IT buildings), or luxury apartments– have been drawn out in Hafeez Contractor’s office. I had met him once, and he said when people marvel at his differently-shaped steel and glass IT buildings and he laughed. “It so easy to make—this way, that way (moving his hands) and its done,” he said. “Speed is success,” he said. I think what he meant was glass and steel are money. That is why eight of the ten new buildings I see today are like that, all round my office in Noida, and Gurgaon.

But some years ago, I also met a different kind of architect– a youth who happened to be a Bengali. Somnath Ray, from a middle-class background, was schooled in Chandigarh, but somehow made it Columbia University, and from there he went to MIT, studying design. I had met him because he had won a big international contest– creating “smart” cities.

In 2007, he had created ParaCity, a beehive-like colony, over what looked like Manhattan. He said he had multiplied the Penrose tiles to make “habitat cells”.

I lost track of him afterward, but yesterday, after reading your post, I searched for him on the net, and found that he was running a structural designing company in Delhi (much like Cecil Balmond of Arup) and creating or proposing to create shocking and surprising structures to make, as he said, infrastructure “smarter” with strange “interventions”.

http://www.dplay.org/

I think he represents the next generation of architects which are more mathematical and computational than the artistic, using the computer brain to push the laws of geometry. The future of urban space, I think, will an image of their concepts. Who else would think of putting up a green belt with trees, grass and parks over the a 124-km long Delhi Metro tracks so that one can also cycle or walk to office over a running train!

http://indian-architects.com/en/projects/detail_thickbox/30851/plang:en-gb?iframe=true&width=850&height=99