Many younger architects and city activists wonder why Charles Correa, the master who passed away on 16 June 2015 in Mumbai at the age of 84, did not mentor more of them. In his earlier years, he did regularly tutor architecture students in the city and occasionally elsewhere in the country and in universities abroad.

On occasion, Correa took up public causes in Mumbai, such as the alternative plan to develop the notorious Backbay Reclamation, with marinas and the like. The fledgling Save Bombay Committee had taken on a venal Maharashtra Congress government in 1974 and successfully halted the plan. More famously, Correa called for a more city-friendly alternative to the redevelopment of mill land in 1996.

But, as in the case of so many artists—which he was—their own work is surely the best inspiration from which other professionals and citizens could derive. In Mumbai, the Kanchenjunga high-rise residential tower on Peddar Road stands as a sentinel to caution designers of the commercial capital’s multi-storey buildings that there is indeed another template: one can build heavenwards yet not turn out concrete-and-steel carbon copies of faceless monstrosities with exotic names.

“When an architect builds a glass tower in the middle of the Arabian desert, he justifies his design with a 100 different reasons—except possibly the real one, viz, that he is trying to (unconsciously) recreate for his clients, the mythic imagery of what to them is the quintessential city of the 20th century: Houston, Texas,” wrote Correa in A Place in the Shade: The New Landscape and Other Essays (Penguin India 2010). In the essay he cites Churchill (not someone he admired) who with “devastating insight” commented, “We shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us.”

In such an environment, with a bastardised modernity, to whom does the citizen turn? Correa could move from the sublime and sacred to the commonplace. This he literally and controversially revealed in the heritage Portuguese Church he overhauled in the heart of Dadar. The venerable baroque church, originally built in 1596, was replaced in its entirety by an ultra-modern vaulting edifice. It was certainly a signature building, with stained glass by M F Hussain. But parishioners, who said it resembled a giant concrete mixer, were left cold by the bare white inner concrete shell and left hot in the centre where the fans could not reach.

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In his report—which was never made public—Correa had proposed a “Golden Triangle,” an open maidan between Paragon, Mumbai and Matulya Mills in Parel by clubbing all the two-thirds of land to be surrendered instead of applying the formula to each mill plot. This area would have been slightly bigger than the triangle formed by Chhatrapati Shivaji Railway Terminus, Horniman Circle and Hutatma Chowk. He also compared, as a model, the footprint of Ballard Estate with Nariman Point. While the former occupied almost the entire plot, the latter occupied only 30%. Yet the built-up area in the low-rise, high density old buildings in Ballard Estate was not that much less and it possessed a human scale.

City activists—among whom I would include myself—have themselves to blame for treating the mill land issue as a workers’ rights cause and forgetting that the city had so much precious land that it could have used, especially when a Mumbaikar has only some 1.2 sqm of open space, far less than Delhi, and much less than New York or London. Belatedly, the Bombay Environmental Action Group filed a writ in the High Court resulting in a stay on the sale of mill land. However, the case went up to the Supreme Court where a battery of top lawyers, from both the Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party, persuaded the judges to permit its sale. Correa tried his utmost, but the city failed him.

Correa had not endeared himself to environmentalists when he disagreed with their opposition to the West Island Freeway that Los Angeles-based consultants had proposed in 1962. He later unkindly cited how, had the same greens existed early in the 20th century, they would have objected to the reclamation for Marine Drive, the iconic curve of the city that is also home to the second-biggest ensemble of Art Deco buildings (after Miami) in the world.

In all likelihood Correa would have looked askance at the current proposal to build a Rs 13,000-crore 36-km long coastal road that will reclaim some 170 hectares of the foreshore. It would have rankled him that this hare-brained project, declared “environment-friendly” by none other than the union environment minister himself, has not had a single public exposition, even while its implementation is proceeding at a dizzy pace. For him, his home was that most precious of things—a city by the sea.Perceptively, he wrote in his 2010 book, “Cities grow—and die—much faster than we think… it [Bombay] is getting better and better as a city, and disintegrating (very rapidly and quite unnecessarily) as environment. Perhaps what the people of Bombay are experiencing is the last burst of energy—the spastic twitches before the end. Living in this city one wouldn’t notice it oneself.”