Remembering India's visionary architect and his legacy - a blueprint of inclusivity for Modi's planned smart cities.

Partly, this was because of Correa's highly refined awareness of the place and power of architecture: spanning the public and private lives and material and metaphysical impulses of human beings, borrowing from a range of inspirations both traditional and modern, drawing from disciplines all the way from the fine arts to urban planning.

But it was also because Correa's willingness for six decades to go beyond the usual world of the elite architect, centred around a single building or project.

Correa was willing to get his hands dirty with the practical problems of mass housing and transportation, as the implications of the tidal wave of migration to the cities that would - as early as the 1960s - soon wash over India and present to its urban planners challenges on a scale the developed world had never faced.

A social vision

Repeatedly in his work, Correa insisted that the architect in modern India, as much as the representatives of its maturing democracy or those in charge of its economy, could radically improve the lives of millions of people by bringing a combination of invention, intelligence, and poetry to man's use of space.

"At its most vital, architecture is an agent of change. To invent tomorrow; that is its finest function," he wrote in 1984. Correa's was, then, a double quest: On the one hand, for a modernist architecture, it was underpinned by Indian ideas and forms and adapted to the peculiarities of the Indian climate; and on the other, a quest for a vivid new imagination of how Indian cities could answer at a low cost, and without discounting the human need for beauty, the spatial needs and predispositions of their toiling and burgeoning masses.

"The rural migrants pour into our cities. They are looking not merely for houses, but for jobs, education, opportunity. Is the architect, with his highly specialised skills, of any relevance to them?" he wrote in his portfolio book Charles Correa in 1985. "This will remain the central issue of our profession for the next decades. To find how, where and when he can be useful is the only way the architect can stretch the boundaries of his vision beyond the succession of middle and upper-income commissions that encapsulate the profession in Asia.”

Yet the catch was that, to be successful, the socially ambitious architect's vision was dependent on the goodwill, intelligence and commitment of other individuals and institutions with their own interests, from municipal corporation to local politician or slumlord. Even when architecture was animated by political vision, politics itself could stymie its goals.
For instance, Correa designed some of the most distinctive and beautiful buildings of modern Mumbai - from the iconic, terraced high-rise south Mumbai apartment building Kanchanjunga to an entire low-rise, sylvan township in the northern suburb of Borivali where I myself lived with great pleasure for several years. His stamp is all over one of the world's great metropolises.