[Urbanstudy] Fight for Your City, Says Charles Correa

[Vinay Baindur]

http://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/bangalore/2014/12/01/Fight-for-Your-City-Says-Charles-Correa/article2549232.ece

Fight for Your City, Says Charles Correa

By Express News Service

Published: 01st December 2014 06:27 AM

Last Updated: 01st December 2014 06:27 AM

BENGALURU: It’s architect, planner, activist and theoretician Charles
Correa himself on the stage of the J N Tata Auditorium and what he once
said about Corbusier’s architecture in Chandigarh, comes to mind,
“Corbusier has sought to create an architecture of passion. No sotto-voce,
no politeness but like Wagner-thunder in the concert hall.”

Charles CorreaCorrea’s voice is weak and broken but he is the Wagner of
architecture and the thunder his words leave in their wake is unmistakable.

And he indelibly impacts hundreds in the auditorium when he says, *“A city
without shared public spaces is a city without culture, without history.”*

He is too witty to sound like a prophet of doom but there is an urgent
warning in his voice when he says, “When you retreat in gated communities,
you shut yourself in the walls of brutal anonymity. You fragment the sense
of community that even the sprawls of slums and chawls have.”

By shutting out communities that are unlike us, we fragment a sense of
connection with others.

We fragment our cities, he says and warns that one day Bengaluru too will
become like Mumbai.

*A city for the very rich and the very poor between whom no connection is
possible but confrontation is imminent and inevitable.*

Correa was in town along with art/culture historian and museologist
Jyotindra Jain to flag off an annual event in the memory of architect Vimal
Jain of Architecture Paradigm who passed away in November 2013.

One of the projects planned for the occasion was, ‘Appropriating Urban
Space’ - a collaborative workshop to appropriate urban space in the city
where possible, using design, art and culture.

The workshop addressed The Visvesvaraya Centre (Life Insurance Corporation
headquarters) near Vidhana Soudha, designed by Charles Correa and imagined
its potential as an interactive public space.

A film, Into the Unknown, directed by Sankalp Meshram about Correa’s
landmark Champalimaud Centre in Lisbon was followed  by a rivetting
conversation between Correa and Jain both of whom rued the appropriation of
art, culture and architecture in India by market forces.

Correa who has won the highest honours of his profession, including the Aga
Khan Award for Architecture, the Praemium Imperiale of Japan, and the Gold
Medal of the UIA and the RIBA, compared non-contextual architecture in
Bengaluru and other cities to museum displays where objects sourced from
various geographies, chronologies and historical narratives are displayed
meaninglessly.

He exhorted architects in Bengaluru, “Don’t build useless things of sublime
beauty.” Architecture, he emphasised, cannot be created in isolation from
people.

He quoted an “ominous” line from Kamu Iyer’s book BOOMBAY; From Precincts
to Sprawl, that says, “Smart cities should be judged by the way they treat
the poor.” And that should tell us where Bengaluru stands in its treatment
of the have-nots who are banished from their homes to make space for malls
and high-rise apartments. To an apologetic builder who said he was possibly
the villain of urban development because he supposedly took away the city’s
best features to make way for the new, Correa retorted much to the
amusement of everyone present, “Then why do you do it?”He also quoted
Churchill by stating, “We shape our buildings and then our buildings shape
us.”

Correa warned Bengalureans that their city was being taken away from them
by market forces whose emphasis is on profiteering, not building  habitable
spaces. He said, “They have ruined MG Road for the next 500 years with the
Metro construction when they could have gone underground with it. If they
had built a steel structure, atleast you would have been able to dismantle
the thing in a few years. Don’t tell me that you can’t do anything to save
your city. What beautiful weather you have, what a great potential to be a
great city..don’t waste this opportunity.”

When a city has too many vehicles on its roads and does not know how to
manage them, it has already lost a part of itself to chaotic, mindless
growth, he warned and asked that Bengaluru must rethink ways to maximise
public transport without putting up intrusive Metro structures that eat
into the city’s wholesomeness.

Architecture in the end, he said, is about wanting to make a difference
even if you are only being paid to build a structure. He had once written,
“Architecture is not a queue in which we have to line up, with perhaps the
Americans ahead, or the Chinese behind. No, each of us has the opportunity
to be on the cutting edge of where we live.”    That was his message today
to Bengaluru’s citizens and architects and when the grand old man of Indian
architecture rose to take leave from the city, hundreds of Bengalureans
rose too.

This time perhaps with an intention to win their city back from land
sharks, insensitive planners and heedless destruction of community spaces.
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