Transcribed Lecture

Order of Engineers and Architects- Beirut

Charles Correa: Professor of Architecture, IndianArchitect in private practice, Bombay; member ofthe Steering Committee of the Aga Khan Awardof Architecture

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Introduction by Sany JamalGood evening ladies and gentlemen. Thetask of introducing celebrities is not aneasy one, particularly when the celebrityin question is none other than the eminentarchitect-planner Charles Correa. As manyof you may already know, Charles Correais an Indian architect and a majorinternational figure in architecture andplanning. As a practitioner, artist, andtheoretician, Prof. Correa is known for thewide range of architectural work in India,studies on urbanization and low costshelter in the third world, which hearticulated in his 1985 publication "theNew Landscape." His architectural designshave been internationally acclaimed andhe has received many awards. Hisintelligent design response to climate andlocation is evident throughout his work,as is his attention to movement throughspace and changes of light. His concernfor India's poor led him to regard peopleand space as resources and to devicemany schemes for low-rise, high-densityhousing intended to provide equity in thebuilt environment. He has writteneloquently about housing in town planningand worked to demonstrate his ideas indeveloping new Bombay. Correa moveseasi ly from the housing for theunderprivileged to hotels, public officesand cultural centers. His creative use ofimageries to project a central idea hasmarked much of his recent works. Hisdramatic flavor is matched by his interestin universal models as represented byMandala's Hindu or Buddhist Cosmicdiagrams- literary interpreted in hisbuildings to express the deep variationbetween museums, industrial plants, officebuildings, university campuses, housingschemas, urban master plans and state

assemblies- all too numerous to enumeratehere. Charles Correa was born inSkanderabad in 1930; he is married since1961, has 2 children, and lives in Bombay,India. Mr. Correa got his masters degreefrom MIT in 1958; his professionalexperience from 1958 till today is carriedin private practice…

Charles CorreaThank you really for inviting my wife andme here to Beirut. It’s a place we alwayswanted to come to. Thirty years ago, everyaerial flight leaving Bombay would stop inBeirut or Cairo and then go on to Romebut we never got off the plane, and wethought next time we will stop but we neverdid. And then the war broke out and wecouldn't come; and now you have thiswonderful conference. I think, and thatgoes for many of us, all those years weheard the most wonderful things aboutBeirut. In fact once a friend of us who livedin Beirut sent us a whole case of yourwine and it was terrific; so now we musttell them that all the things we heard aboutBeirut are really true. Because we havebeen here for only 24 hours it's a verysuperficial judgment. But really, it is amarvelous city. It has scale it has thislandscape that is all the time moving. Andthen it has this energy. These buildingsthat you are rebuilding, and the feelingone has that I know that you have at themoment- a kind of set back in your buildingschedule- but a feeling that it is landingon its feet. Once more you have this ability,which must have been there through thecenturies, for the people to survive. Theysurvived with grace and you survived againwith a style. Now it seems to me thatbuildings that are rebuilt are practical; theyare useful. I am sure they will be functional;

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but perhaps we should expect a buildingto be expressing something aboutourselves. I think that is very very important.I think Winston Churchill of all people- Iam not an admirer of Churchill- but hissentence is really very good. You musthave heard it. He said: “we build ourbuildings and than our buildings build us."So it's very very important what we build.

The problem of modern life, not just herebut all over the world is that we tend tobuild very banal things and then wecomplain about the banality of life. Butthere is very little expression of what arethe values of that society. I think just amonth ago at the conference of architects,Suha mentioned the president of Iran.Without notes he said something like: “inorder to build architecture, we must notcopy a past, nor must we copy otherpeople's present." And then I think he said:“we must make our own future." That isreally wonderful. If you think about it; aman like Frank Lloyd Right; he is in Chicagoin 1890 onwards; he invented the wayAmericans were going to live for 100 years.Houses in America come as a handed-down version of Right. Mythic imagery,you know the 2 steps after the dinningarea, the picture window, the car park, etc.How did Right do this? Not because helooked at the history and looked off historybut because he understood intuitively whatAmericans wanted to become. That is veryimportant. So it seems to me thatarchitecture just doesn't talk about thehistory; of course you must know aboutwhat you were, but it's what you want tobecome. This is very relevant to us in India.India is a large country. I am alwaysembarrassed to tell you how big. It's a1000 millions people as of last week! That'sabout 300 times bigger than you are, andit is many many different cultures. In a waythat is part of the richness I think. I amsure that all of us who go to America findthat it is many different people. To theextent that we are pluralistic ourarchitecture should express this pluralism.

As it does, I think we become stronger. Ithink India is like a palm: you know a setof transparent layers of myths, differentmyths that are layered through thecenturies.

So today I thought I will try to tell yousomething about India and working thereas an architect. You can see what isrelevant to you and what is totally irrelevant.One of the things in India is that the issuesare huge; I mean they are really muchbigger than any of us. They vary from themost particular like squatters; what do youdo when half of Bombay actually is livingillegally, half of Delhi, half of Rio deJaneiro... These are epic issues. Big issuesactually are an advantage because just inthe act of addressing them we have thechance to grow. So, although there aretremendous frustrations, believe me, livingin India and working in India, I am surehere also, will build frustration. But I amsure the frustration is not so bad. In fact,it gives you the chance to grow. I oftenthink of what you produced at the beginningof the century compared to what they areproducing today architecturally. At thebeginning of the century, you had a house,you had so many things: tremendousenergy on the arts and architecture andit's not a matter of talent. I think Goddistributes talent equally the way hedistributes rainfall.

So I think we, who are living in a developingpart of the world, are [I don't know if youfeel living in a developing part of the worldbecause for me you look so affluent drivingin the city] developing and that's atremendous advantage of having to faceissues, fundamental issues because theygo from the most practical to the mostmetaphysical– that is one of thecharacteristics of architecture.I am trying to show you that in India italways was, and I think here too, it was ametaphysical issue of creating, of makinga model of the cosmos. A model of thedeepest things you believe in, and it

interests me very much how an earth stonecan represent something very metaphysicalin your mind. Now to do this I think it’s notjust a question of looking at history but itis trying to understand something thesociety likes in a fundamental way. It'ssomething which I heard Louis Kahn callingvolume zero. He was talking to somestudents at Penn and [I don't know exactlythe sentences but it goes very much likethis] he said: "I love English history, hesaid I love the bloodlines of it;” he said: “Ihave 8 volumes at home which I lovereading;” and then he says” “actually I havenot read all 8, I have read the first;” andthen he said: “I haven’t even read the wholeof the first volume, I just read the first fewpages;” and then he said: “I don't thinkhistory started the way they say it started,it started before that, I want to read VolumeZero." I think that is so elegant; that it isso true. I think he goes on to sayarchitecture is magnificent because it dealswith the recesses of the mind with thatwhich is not said and not yet made. Thatis really beautiful and it is really the strengthof someone like Aalto who could make atotally modern building yet it speakseloquently of Finland. Or Le Corbusier ofthe Mediterranean: it is reaching thatvolume zero; and if we do not reach volumezero then we should try. I mean in thecultures in which we live, architecturebecomes an empty gesture of invention-either as a kind of wild geometry or as afashion. But with volume zero of courseeverything changes. So I put together someslides so we can discuss what can be thevolume zero in the context of India.

So the question is what would be volumezero in the context of India and to someextent I would say some of these thingswould be relevant to you here?I start with this slide which is a typicalcourtyard. It is in Spain. It could be herein Beirut. It could even be in many otherplaces in Greece or India or China. It showsa set of rows around an open space, whichis open to the Godly sky. It has something

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interesting. All the rooms look again andagain at the same set, at the same scene;and instead of the scene becoming boring,it becomes more and more interesting asyou see it from different rooms, and fromdifferent angles.

Here is another courtyard from Bombay,a Roman courtyard and it is highly formaland very monumental. But is working inthe same way; but here it is even moreclear the importance of the open skyabove, the rooms around, and then whatyou call the axis of the universe goingfrom the earth up to the sky above. Thiscourtyard, this kind of typology where youare looking at empty space whichgenerates a kind of energy of course, iscentral to many things, including theMandala. I remember Hassan Fathi talkingabout the Arab house and said: “all daythe Arab lives with sand crossing the desertand would see nothing but theformlessness of sand and then in theevening comes to this house- his mudhouse in the desert. And then, in thecourtyard in the center, suddenly the airbecomes very cool. It’s like the blessingof Allah. Because the deep penetration ofthe outer space the Arab walks, sits intothe courtyard, and sees above in the nightsky this incredible pattern of stars. It is theexact opposite of what he has been seeingall day…” Now I think when this goes onin thousands of years, it must have workedthrough the consciousness of the people,into the deep structure.

This fence is in West Africa and you cansee people sitting under a big tree underthe open sky, these are the elders in thevillage and the whole village was just somemud houses but it is structured by theroots of this tree. So this is why in India,but not just in India, in most of Asia, theidea of the Guru sitting under the tree isvery important. It's the way you findenlightenment; it is not the little redschoolhouse of North America. It is theopen space; and this has tremendous

architectural implications.Here for instance we see a building, thisisMies in Chicago. This is the Chapel at IIT.You see it closed and sealed because ofthe cold weather. It is completely differentfrom the picture on your right. Here oneis either inside or outside. There is a baseand the building has a front door and onesees the inside when he is outside.

Now if I show you a building, this is inOudaypur. It is completely different buildingbecause it comes from another volumezero. There you don't know when you areinside the building or when you are out ofit. It’s very ambiguous as you step in andout to the places you get changes of thelight, of movement of air, and all this makesarchitecture. And anyone who has beento any place around all the way from hereto Isfahan, to Delhi, to China, to Japanwould know the importance of this kind ofexperience. Another thing I want you tonotice here is that architecture is anarchitectural gesture which captures piecesof the sky. In fact that's what makes itevocative. There is an end of the straightline. He doesn't want that sky becauseprobably it's so cold in Chicago that youwouldn't want to be reminded of that. I amnot being critical of this, I am trying to saythat the tragedy of we starting importingthese buildings into places like Beirut orBombay or Singapore which is what ishappening. This was made for anotherclimate and for another cultural condition.

I want to show you some of the projectswe did starting with one of my earliestones: this was a memorial to MahatmaGandhi. And this is Gandhi’s own house.As you can see, it got two rooms and ithas a little courtyard at the back. Gandhispends most of his time in this verandaor in the courtyard. He has two pairs ofsandals, then a pair of spectacles, andthen a watch, and then two bowls, andthree monkeys speak no evil, etc. And Ithought that is very touching and I felt weshould try to express these, they are very

Tube houses, Ahmedabad, India (1961-62).

Ghandi memorial, Sabarmati Ashram,Ahmedabad, India (1958-63).

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human scale and the humanity of thisman. But using the same materials heused in his house: that tiled roof, stonefloors, and the brick walls. But using themwith our own voice because I don't think itwas a question of copying what he built.It was built in his time. So what we've madehere was a center of Gandhi studies, akind of memorial museum and it's usingthe same tiled roof but they are put in apattern, which is quite formal yet, verynarrative. It's a long narrative of movingeasily, symmetrically, and generally laidaround some water. And these places youmove through, as we said just now, areambiguous; some of them are enclosed toinclude letters or photographs or books.And those places can grow. You can extendthe building as more letters are found.

This is the kind of courtyard we have. Wedon't have any windows. We have thesekinds of louvers so the light can go through;and this is the space where you wouldhave the letters but out here you just walkthrough these kinds of spaces. Nowbecause of this kind of thing, very poorpeople feel free to enter the building, theydon't feel intimidated, and I think that isnice. I should point one thing, one elementwe added over here was the channel whichyou see here. The whole vocabulary isusing the same material but in a completelydifferent way. This is the extra element,the concrete channel, it's in the water butit also accesses the beam so you canextend the building. So you then get thesekinds of spaces one can move through.

Now I'll continue to show you how we resortto the past but in a way to reinvent it. I'llshow you some examples from very earlywork where I tried to deal with climate.One of the very important aspects, workingin a place like India, is housing. It's not justa question of designing museums andother special buildings. I have really spenta lot of time thinking about housing and Iimagine you do that too. I love these twoexamples. These are absolutely

endogenous housing. This is from Pakistan.These are the wonderful wind-catcherhouses; you got the wind coming in,humidified, and then used inside the rooms.It's really like a machine for living but awonderfully evocative thing and thisimpressed me very much when I was ayoung architect. And the other of courseis the Bangalo and it is meant for the hothumid areas which would be more likeBeirut, I don't know if Beirut is this dry butthis would be more relevant, I'll try to showsome examples of this.

This was some housing I did in 1961 in acompetition which we won. They wantedapartments but we found that we shouldget the same density with narrow tubehouses like this where the hot air by thevery shape of the roof you got the hot airrising and getting out from there. Themezzanines become automatically a bedand a desk and you save on the windowby closing the courtyard with plants upthere. So it's a very small kind of house.These were the prototypes, which areclustered together. Now the same principleswere used for a much lavished house forMelona.

This was in 1961 or 1962. Here, you'vegot a number of these tubes; they cancontrol the rising worm air that goes outfrom the top.

These come from experiments we did. Itwas a crazy thing in 1961 to do. I forgotwe've done this. The other day somestudents pulled it out and made a big posterout of it because they say this kind ofarchitecture is back in fashion and youshould know it. But it wasn't meant to befashionable. It was meant exactly to seewhat we were talking about: how you woulduse a mega construction, which in itselfwould be its ventilator. So you have a thinghere where you enter through here andyou go through that. You can imagine andget out. You can see the section; the wholething was built as random. They didn't want

any computer to analyze it so it was donepurely by the experience of the structuralengineer to decide how much concrete tospend on. In India one gets the chance toexperiment.

This is a house; we are again with thesame principle of working in a hot dry area.This is in Rajestar. You all know I think,that a house around a courtyard is reallythe nicest thing you can do because youcan step out to the courtyard in the evening.The problem is that by evening the roofhas become very hot and if you make athick roof then it takes longer to get hotbut it still gets hot and heats the roomslate at night. That is why people sleep incourtyards. So better than making a thickroof is to put on a second roof to protectthe first and this one can be very light. Itcan be in bamboo and maybe paintedwhite and then they would reflect about 70or 80% of the sun energy and keep thisthing shaded. So then I realize that if youraise this roof then you could create roomsup here. And this whole project was neverbuilt but it had a big effect on us in theideas that you could get this kind of longhouses because there it was going to bebuilt of stones which actually spans 10feet, this is in Kortania in Jaipur. And fromit we developed. This is the idea of builthouses, which have a section, which isclosing, like this. A section you can use inthe afternoon in the summer and then youhave a section which opens up you canuse in the evening or in the winter whenyou want the sunlight. I don't know whatBeirut's climate is but it may have thesemoments in the course of the year; perhapseven in the course of the day. So in thishouse you've got three bays and one bayis a winter section, one the central bay isa summer section and the third bay is thekitchen and bathroom and all the services.

These are the elevations of the house.This is just finishing construction. This isdone in 1965 which of coursediagrammatically shows the sections.

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Now I'd like to switch to the other prototypeI showed you - the Bangalo. This one isfor hot humid climate. As you know, they'revery common in parts of southern Indiaand Southeast Asia and Brazil. It's reallya house where you've got these rooms,living, dining, bedrooms, etc. and thenverandas around protecting them. Andthis is much better because it doesn't heatand you can double as circulation. So youcan see you have master spaces usingKant's terminology and subsidiary spaces.So we did a series of apartments. This isan apartment house with 3 units. You cansee the main living room, 2 bedrooms,kitchen, etc. But what we tried to do is tomake a version of this where you havethe main room, the veranda, and the study.By sliding panels this way you can thenconnect this veranda to the bedrooms; oryou slide it this way so it connects to theliving room. So the living room can useall the space and the parents and childrencan use that and you can keep varyingthis and it gives very interesting kind ofspaces because the spaces are kind ofcouple spaces which will lead one intothe other. In this respect, one set of spacesactually protects the one behind. So indoing that, I realize that if only the space,this outer zone, if you make it doubleheight than it could become a garden andit could use the sun and the rain for it togrow. So by protecting these spaces youwere doing something useful and if youdid double height and single height hereyou could interlock them.

So here we got to Bombay which is a veryhigh-rise city. I found that we could have2 levels on one side, one on the other, 2here one on the other, sometime 2 hereand 2 on the side. So you could go from3 bedrooms to about 6 bedrooms, thiswas done in the early 70's. Now it's doingsomething else of course. Everyapartment goes all the way from the eastto the west, which is the breeze directionin Bombay. You have two lines of defense

against the sun and the rain. This is theclose up of a typical terrace. Standing onthe terrace you could see the terrace onthe corner and it's about six meters heightto the terrace above; the living diningroom is here; the study, and then youcome back to two more bedrooms.Because of the way your eyebrows workyou don't see this so much and you thinkyou are in the open space. Open to skyspace is very much part of volume zero.I shall return to this. And you see thebedrooms. They are overlooking the samespace. This is the double-line defense tothe outside; so if it's a very hot day youcan move back in here. This is the buildinghere and this is Bombay; and that's thesea out there; and that is where the breezecomes from. Now this use of the open tosky space has other very practicaladvantages. For instance, Bombay is acity on water, it is a high-rise city and ithas this tremendous amount of populationwhich I told you about where you get acity today of eleven million people of whichabout 6 million people are living like this.If you have time to go one day you cansee the horror of such a thing. Thesepeople are very human people and theyare really not muggers or anything of thissort. They work with their hands. It is justthat the city doesn't have space for them.What is frightening about this life, to mymind, is this discontinuity between theway well-to-do or even the middle-classlives and the other half of people wholives like this. So it's like 2 different planets.In the old days in India, there wascontinuity, it was a bigger house but itwas the same kind of thing. Now in India,the great danger is this split which yousee in Rio de Janeiro and many otherplaces. This is Lagos. It is not only ahuman problem or a moral problem; it isalso a political problem.

One of the things we did is to finallyconvince the government to go aheadwith new Bombay; this was 20 years ago,now it's about 20 million people.

It should have grown faster; we wantedthem to move capital there but at leastit's taking off and the bridges have beenbuilt etc. By doing things where you're notjust putting poor people here, we havegenerated jobs here, there is masstransport. There are many issues, I don'twant to go into that; I just wanted to touchon one thing and that is housing. How doyou house people at a price they canafford? This is the income distribution inBombay; it's an old figure. The figureshave changed because of inflation butone figure hasn't changed: that of 40% ofthe people living below poverty line. Thisis frightening; it means all the buildings.What I am showing you would apply tothe top 10% and maybe some 16% of thepeople are living in this. These peoplehave to live the way we saw and I wasmade the chief architect for New Bombayin the first few years and I had theopportunity to try and look at this issue.How can we have cities, which we canafford to live in?

Then I found the use of open-to-skyspace, which we were talking about. Ithas tremendous practical things in thisproblem of housing the poor because yousee this mud village and people have thisone little room but they also have acourtyard. Here in Nepal and in Katmandu,you can see that this kind of use of openspace moves into the public space too. Ifyou look at the housing, if you look at thisfamily, they have this room, they have thisspace they can use for cooking, you cansee here but they also use it for sleepingat night and for the children to play etc.So they can use it for about 70% of theessential things in life. Making this roomhas a production cost. It costs so muchmud or so much concrete etc. Making thiscourtyard has also a production cost, ituses so much of urban land, which meansservices, etc.

The tradeoff between these 2 costs andthe usability gives you the optimal housing.

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least, an open-to-sky space has awonderful quality that it’s a kind of systemin any town, in any culture. It would varyfrom culture to culture with the climate butit means that the space in the courtyard,the space in the threshold, the space ofthe community and there is the space ofthe whole city, what we call the "maydan"and you call the "medan" I think. There atradeoff between these spaces, a placelike the Kasba in Algiers or the town ofMikonos in Greece, there is hardly anyspace like this; in fact none; but that spaceis given at the terrace and courtyard level.So it's a very human place to study. Insome other town you might get a lot ofspace over here and less in this area butthe main thing is to realize that housing isnot just this box but it's all these otherspaces. Now that you are rebuilding Beirut,I am sure you're keeping this in mind butit's tremendously important.

This is just an attempt here to try and dothis in New Bombay. These are very highdensities, a least for us, of 500 people perhectare with schools; but we started asmall unit of 7 houses which are builtaround a courtyard of about 8 meters. Thehouses don't touch each other. They canbe built around 2 boundaries so that theycan grow independent from each otherand they have cross-ventilation. Theresize is about 55 to 75 m2 so you get akind of equity and continuity from thepoorer people to the richer people. Nowyou get a cluster of 7 houses like that.That is the basic cluster and you see thatyou can repeat them to 3 clusters andthen you repeat it again, etc. You finallyget the town which gets about 6 familiesand this density, I told you, of 500 peopleper hectare with the schools and openspaces, etc. The typologies goes all theway from just giving a piece of land witha tree and a roof for a family to quitesophisticated houses because on 70 m2,I think the average size of many housesin Amsterdam is no bigger then that in ourOudaypoor.

This question may not be so useful to youbut for us it was crucial.

This is only a diagram. The question ishow much land we are using by havinglow rise but human-scale housing. In thisdiagram which is purely a diagram, it's a5 minutes walk, half a mile or 3/4 kilometersquare and that's a railway station. Youcan get 25000 people on either sides,50000 people all together and you keep30 m2 in the open spaces which what wethought the average for the Indian climateand culture in Bombay at least. Now if Iwant to double that density to 50000 oneither side, you have to go to 4 stories, or5 stories. I think that's the point why yousee much of the housing here in Beirut. Ifyou wanted to double it again, you willhave to go to 20 stories and on the scaleof the city, this is what happened on thehousing area so you are going from groundfloor to 4 stories, to 20 stories just to doubleto four times. On the scale of the city youare not saving much land. I think thisdiagram was made by Lesley Martin atthe time of the English new towns of the50's and he showed that only 1/3 of thecity is used for housing. So if you doublethe density of the housing, which meanswhen you go from 4 stories to 20 storiesyou will not save much for your city ofBeirut. On the other hand, if you doublethe densities you might have quite adifferent life style in the housing.

What is said is that we don't see that, wedon't realize that we are not saving muchland for the city and we build buildingwhich really got to do with having this kindof repetition of high-rise. We think we aregetting higher densities, we are notactually. This slide, I show very often, it isin Saint-Louis; I think. This is Brazil by theway. Brazilia is unbelievable because sucha city- a beautiful city- Rio, but when theytried to build high in Brazilia they did thisbecause they had to very quickly house10,000 to 100,000 people. I am showingthis to you, because perhaps this is an

issue here too. In this case, this is Saint-Louis, and these are houses of about 18mheight and about 7m deep and they getopen spaces for parking and for air to gothrough. If you push these buildings downso if they fell on their face, they wouldhave enough space for each of them tofall down, there is enough space and thenyou'll get housing like this. I think this isfrom Saudi Arabia. It is a traditional villageand it's stunning because I would imaginethe densities here are higher than thereor at least the same and this is about 6mhigh housing and every space ispersonalized and usable whereas thespaces here are unusable all except forparking. This is in Mikonos; but you cansee when you desegregate the space howusable it becomes. So if ever one has abill of rights for housing in a place likeIndia, the house has to be incremental. Itcan grow; it should be pluralistic; it shouldbe many kinds of houses. People shouldparticipate in the planning and in theconstruction so they can generate income.There should be equity; that's equality;and they should be open to the sky-space.Then finally, desegregation means thatyou don't try to make some solution foreverything.

I must quote Hassan Fathi again. He says"no architect should design more than 12houses", I don't know how he arrived at12 at a time and he said "if you take thegreatest surgeon in the world and ask himto operate on 200 people in one day hehas to kill them all.” So I think we mustunderstand what danger and damage wedo when we design 1000 houses in oneday or one year.

Anyway, if the architecture is malleablethen people can bring an expression oftheir own culture, their own mythic imagery,which I think is very important.

So malleability is important in architecture.Here, we get for instance a Scottishcolonial Bombay. This is the biggest slum

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in Asia. You can see how poor thesepeople are; but it is a festival day. Theydressed up the children and the motherhas made some diagrams on the ground.These diagrams are kind of sacreddiagrams, memories of memories. This isthe aspect of your work as architects whichI find also very interesting, and the use ofmythic imageries which underlies andgives meaning to the built-form. This isthe kind of imagery we are looking at.These are called "yantra." This is the mostfamous of them. All the "shruyantra," whichis 9 triangles and the center of the centeris the source of all energy. In fact, theother one I saw was in Iran and was calledMandala.

In India and for temples, the Mandala isa square and you could subdivide it.Usually, the temples are 64 or 81 squares.The Mandala is the Mandala of the planetsand these are the 9 planets, two of whichare imaginary. The city of Jaipur was builtby a man called Jaisink and he wasfascinated by the sky. The design of thecity is based on 2 sets of mythic images.One is the mythic values and images ofthe Mandala of the 9 squares and you seethe 9 squares placed on the side. Thereis a hill over there so the one square ismoved and that is the plan of Jaipur. Thecenter is the god and that is the palace.So the movement of square is what hehad to do because of the hill.

This is a palace; and you can see the wayJaipur works because of the hot dry desertair. You get the courtyard and you get thisin the middle of the courtyard. In thedistance, you see another thing out there.You can see that through. This is the JanterManter, other set of mythic values whichhe was obsessed by; that was the newestmyth of science, the idea of being preciseand accurate, so he combined these 2 inone city. It wasn't a kind of schizophreniahe brought them together and that'sincredible. Some of you may have beenin India and seen this. The first attempt

was in Pakistan and this was the second.He built 5 of them in different cities ofIndia.

When we did an exhibition and we includedJaipur years ago, I thought he was thefirst modern man. He was like our firstPrime Minister Nehru who wanted todiscover the oldest things about India. Thediscovery of India and at the same timethe invention of a new future in this newcountry when we first got independence,I thought in that seems Jaysink was a kindof a forerunner of Nehru. So when wewere asked to design an art center inmemory of Nehru in Jaipur, I immediatelythought of making a version of the old city,a kind of a model of that city but I took the9 squares and I moved one across sothese 9 squares represent the 9 planetsand the center is empty because it has tobe empty; that's why it becomes the sourceof all energies. By moving this to this side,it gave us entry to 3 different parts; this isthe planet with the most powerful planets,so we put the theatre. So the public hasto be able to come as pedestrians andthis allows the cars to come from this side.

It really gave me access to the Mandalabecause if I really hadn't done this thingwhich is a kind of a 20th-century-thing-to-do; and if I had to enter here I could neveruse such a plan. So when we use thingslike this, one has to re-invent then. Thisis the entrance and you're going from hereand these are the planets, each about 30m, and with these walls it got open to skyfrom the space within it. Then, thetraditional symbol of that planet is stone.Because the only connection betweenthese boxes is an opening 3 meters squareit allows each planet to have its totallyarchitectural expression; which you cansee it here. It also means that you can gothrough it in any way, every time thenarrative changes you can see it in adifferent order to each visit but the centeris empty and therefore you know yourorientation where you are. This is an old

drawing of the 9 planets. It's very beautiful.It shows each of them had a color and aquality. One is of, as I said, a plan; one isan angle, etc. And these are the symbols.A friend of mine who was very interestedin these things did the research. He wasa graphic artist and he found all the oldtraditional symbols and the qualities. Thenwe matched them and I made up plans ineach. For instance, this is the eclipse ofthe sun; and if the moon is covering thesun and we made 2 circles black and whiteetc. and then of course, in this thing onthe graph of the ceiling, you put a wholecosmos which is the entire middleKingdom: a traditional painting which isthen put into 3 dimensions by a traditionalartist. This is the Christian Lord who isone of the mythic images in Ketro andthat's the size of a person walking downthe earth. This is a very well-known image.These are different planets and etc., andthis is the center, which is empty. In theprogram they wanted an open-air theatreso we made this. So we always matchsomething useful that suited our ownagenda. In other words, in order to do thiskind of things, I had to write my own secretagenda and I never told the client whowas the government. The governmentwouldn't have bought it. I didn't say we'vedone the model of the cosmos and all that,I just said this is the plan; and the directorwould ask: where is my room here? Anddoes it have an attached bathroom? I sayyes, and the plans go through.

This is looking through one of thesesquares into Gourou, this is looking fromGourou back into the square. You get adifferent sense of space because it's ona different construct. Usually a publicbuilding I will design going from one roomto the next but here it's all-discontinuous.Each time you step through that squareit's like Alice in the wonderland. On theinside of each planet are the suspiciouscolors of that planet. On the outside arethe stone wall and then the inlaid work.This is the moon eating the sun literary. I

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am showing this because it reminds meof a video game called Batman. Youremember that? And the thing is that thissymbol is of 100 years old maybe 1000years but the human mind hasn't changed.And that's what I am talking about; thedeep structure and volume zero.

Now while we are doing this building whichwas of the black hole, about the space,the big bang. So out-of-the blue wesuddenly got this commission to do acenter of astro-physics and astronomy.Here the basic underlying imagery is totallydifferent from the Mandala stuff. What wesaw here it comes out of things like theenergy Mandala.

The infinite number of galaxies, about thespace, so we enter these columns, madeof concrete and we go through these blackwalls which are the local stone that Ithought would symbolize the blacknessof space. And then we come to thesecourtyards. This is a black hole in themodeled landscape and from there theenergy goes into this other and these allcome from theories, etc. There is no artin the place, it all comes from the imageryof the scientist. This was to try to symbolizein the landscape itself, the energy comingout of that.

There is something interesting about theblack hole. You know when we were talkingabout the Mandala and that the center isempty. Because the center is empty, itgenerates this energy which is true abouta house around a courtyard or a versionof it. It is also true of what scientists believetoday. They really believe that a black holeis energy devouring itself, which is exactlywhat the Mandala is about. It is interestingnot because thousands years ago peoplein Iran or in India knew about modernphysics. To my mind, it is because it is thesame human mind and that it is very muchin the deep structure of the human mind:the idea of the center. So here the fourmain accesses are shown by great

scientists that are Einstein and Galileo.That is one of the columns, which wecame through. On the dome, we wonderedwhat would be the equivalent of thecosmography we saw in the earlier oneand the scientist said it should be precisebecause that is one of the essential thingsin science and so this is the exact positionsof stars on the day we started the projectand this was done by the scientiststhemselves, they were very supportive. Itwas impossible to have done that withouttheir enthusiastic support. This isFoucault’s pendulum in the heart of thescheme, the center. It shows how earth isturning. It just goes continuously changingdirections. This of course is for measuringthe sun and the stars. We used the blackstone and steel because we wanted tomake our own version of what Jay Sinkhas done.

I will show you 2 more buildings. This oneis the British council building in Delhi. Theywanted an auditorium and a library and afew meeting rooms and some offices. Ofcourse, we had to design that but in myown agenda. I thought how wonderful ifwe could show some of the richness ofwhat has happened in India; what I talkedabout earlier: the wonderful overlays ofdifferent cultures and mythic beliefs whichfinally made India. The way I havedesigned it, is that when you open thefront gate you see all the way to the backof the building and right at the back of thesite is the head of Shiva and this is theaccess of Hinduism. So the head of Shivarepresents, I mean, Hindus believe thatfrom the head flowed the Gangue riverand this water goes into the spinal whichfor them is an access to the Hindu. Thenext overlay was Islam which came along.Islam brought a wonderful pleasure in lifewhich did not exist in Buddhism andHinduism and which enriched that; andthis is symbolized by the garden ofparadise which came I think from Iran.The third one, which is down indoors, sowe move to the semi outdoors, it is what

Europeans, brought to India and that isfor the renaissance and the age of reason.As a symbol of renaissance was this thingused by Michelangelo in his capital by theviceroy’s house. We used this to symbolizethe belief in rationality, that you can actuallyinvent the future, etc. So these forms arein a line and then right across the front isthe pluralism of India, which all this couldhappen. So India is in the shape of a greatBanyan tree and this was done by a brilliantEnglish artist called Howard Hutchinssome of you might know his work, Howardusually works on small canvases and thecolours. He is very much influenced byMatisse but he decided to do the wholething in black and white and in two kinds:white marble and black stone. He paintedit on one meter long and then we had itinlaid, you can see the stones and thebrush strokes all mimicked. We designedin a way that the whole- all things- workswith the architecture to draw your eye intothe building. It goes right in with it. Then,of course, it is the sunlight of things; thesense of the sky above comes throughthe shadows, etc. This is looking back theother way from the head of Shiva throughthe garden of paradise out.

This is the last project I will show you. Itis the assembly in Bowpal. This one thatgot the academy award a year or two agois a circular building and it is a verycomplicated building. It is a difficult buildingto show. One has to be there. It becamecircular because it is on a site on the topof the hill in the middle of the city next tothe other government’s buildings. But thereis no direct road to that site. The accessroad is very casual. It goes something likethat and we tried different shapes but Ifound that if we made a square buildingor a rectangular one, it always at momentslooked clumsy but of course the thingabout a circle is that it always is frontal toyou regardless from where you see it. Itis the same length and the same heightand so that was very useful. Another thingis that we divided that up and we got five

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courtyards and replaced the big roomsin the corners, the upper hall, the lowerhall, the combined hall and the library.These courtyards were very usefulbecause all the offices could be put alongthe courtyard. When you are asked to doan assembly building you think you aredesigning some meeting rooms or somehuge halls but actually you are designinga huge office building because it is theministers, at least in India, who want allthe space. For instance, this stategovernment has 70 ministers in thecabinet, the other day I was saying it is30 more than Ali Baba and each of themhas to have a secretary and a waitingroom, etc. So here we get this thing on ahill in the middle of the city and, itself, itlooks like a little city. This is the combinedhall; this is the Lower House; this is theMain House, etc. Although it is a circle, itis a very loose circle. I should have saidthat making it a circle, it gets tworeferences, which were not my intention.This room bulges out from the circle butwe used that to give more energy to thewhole thing. The whole thing sits on amap of Madiapradesh. It is a much morecomplex building than one can showbecause at moments it disintegrated tomany forms and came back again. It has3 main entrances. This is the VIP entrance;I will show it to you in a minute. One thingI like about this building is that being ona hill in the middle of a city, it has stunningviews of the city in all directions from everyroom and even from the verandas butwhat is nice is that this building belongsto the people; it is a democratic building.If this had been a head office or some biggovernment corporation or some privateindustrialist it would be very obscene tomy mind to control this city in this way butit is nice that it is for democracy. We havegot 4 entrances; this is the entrance forthe public. The four courtyards I told youabout are in the center. We specially madea kind of space where the people couldcome in because the very poor peoplecome walking 5 or 7 days with their children

for some complaint. And they are notallowed into the building usually in Indiabecause they are too dirty and they waitoutside so we thought to let them sit here;they can spend time on these steps. Herewe got tribal people to paint mythic imageson the wall of what they see life is about:the birds; this is an airplane; it is almostlike a bird; tigers, whatever. Here is thediagram, you can see the three entrances,this is where we were just in; this is wherethe members come in; and this is wherethe VIP comes in from. The public cannotgo in further then this because of securitybut then they can turn and they can go onthis ramp and come to the upper leveloverlooking the combined hall or go thisway and go up this ramp which is thisramp over here. So they do experiencethe main accesses and the same for theVIP, etc. It is again a complex thing ofdifferent levels and the cabinet room isover here on access with that. Thisentrance is quite wonderful, it was doneby an artist with his version of the sunshygate and he has done it in many layers ofkite papers and it is beautiful. This is thatcentral hall it is very difficult to photographbecause it is different connecting levels;here again you can see the spaces. Andthen these are the courtyards around whichthe government offices are. This meansthat when you are reaching for a ministeryou don’t have to look at double-loadedcorridor. You spend a lot of your life waitingto see the minister if you were to deal withour government. You can look at this; thisshot brings us back to where we startedthe axis mundi which connects the earthto the sky above.THANK YOUQ 1: We have seen very nice slides aboutthe zero volume. In comparison with theMies Van der Rohe house, it was smalltiny columns and beams. Also in the houseof Ghandi it was tiny columns while in yourmuseum about Ghandi we have seen veryhuge columns and beams. Why?A 1: In the museum, as I told you, I wasn’ttrying to make a house looking like

Ghandi’s house at all. We took the premiseof using the same material but using it ina different way for a different purpose.Here we are talking about a structure,which can grow, it was put on a land, whichwas very bad so it had to have points andbeams but this doesn’t concern you. WhatI was trying to say was that you don’t copythe past anymore in old building inBombay. I am not going to say it is a lotof bungalows put one over the other. Itisn’t bungalows at all but it try to use theprinciples, which a Bungalow uses to tryto make a high-rise building and get opento sky space stacked one over the other.So I guess that was my point in many ofthe things, I showed you, are how we canuse the past as principles and get at thedeep structure that underlies it rather thanjust copy the shapes of the past.

You must have a comment on theMandala, how could you miss it?

Q 2: I just like to make an observation, Iguess I have known Charles and Monicanow some 25 years or so. I really want tocomplement you on how poetically you’venurtured your own culture and overcomeyour MIT training.

A 2: It was very tough.

Q 3: Mr. Correa, I have a question. In theintroductory words you, pardon my crudeparaphrase, but you referred to a fact thatwe make architecture but eventuallyarchitecture makes us…

A 3:….We make our buildings and thenour buildings make us. It was Churchillwho said that

Q 3: yes, can you give us an illustrationof how in any situation you got feedbackon how buildings that you have designedaffected people, and that people get backto you?A 3: I think that anyone who has designeda house or something, the moment when

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someone might tell you something nicelike this, it did affect us. But I think thatwhat happens very much even in largerinstitutional buildings- you know the oneof the astro-physics- it has become amongastro-physicists a very well known building.They have international conferences therebecause it is a small network of peopleand what they like about it is that it tellsthem about their world. Actually, to mymind it is a much braver building than theone in Jaipur and I don’t know if it is asuccessful one and for a very simplereason that in Jaipur building there arethe ancient ideas of the cosmos.

The idea of having the center full of energy,the black hole. So all you have to do isimagine a building, which expresses thisdiagram. Your ideogram I would say likeYing Yang- you know the Chinese idea ofblack and white, male female, etc. Oncethat ideogram exists and it takes a wholeculture to produce it, the architect canmove in much more easily. In the case oftoday’s ideas of the cosmos which arefantastic like expanding the universe, etc.there are no ideograms, our culture hasnot yet develop an ideogram. The onlyideogram I can think of is when you seethe letters E=MC2. We know it meansEinstein or it means atomic energy butthat is an ideogram but it is not a visualone. It is a verbal or a written one. So itseems to me that the Iyoka building hada huge handicap. We had to try and workout how you express these things.

The British council works because at thistime in India we do have a lot of problemsof different people, etc. It is interesting tothink that these are in my mind all overlays;it is just many generations- I meancenturies of overlays- and think that oncewe were having a conference and thenJoseph Rykwert said that a public buildingcannot express a person’s idiosyncraticideas. In a house I can make my ownideas but if it is a public building I have toexpress public set of values. But then

interesting thing comes out; because thereis not one set of values in any society,there are many sets of values; certainlyin India. And then architecture becomesvery important as a way of expressing thepluralism of a society. We mustn’tunderestimate what the renaissance reallydid. To my mind the renaissance was abunch of very, I mean the medieval churchand the society were tremendously narrow-minded and they were gothic. Then therewas a bunch of lunatic people who hadstarted seeing the old roman ruins andtemples and they thought: my goodnessthey are much better than what we arebuilding and drawing and it should havelead to a heresy into anything, which theywere thrown out. But no people likeBramante, Michelangelo, and stuff; theyfound a way of making a church which gotthe whole Christianity into a pagan temple.What is Saint Peter but a pagan temple?In its imagery and yet the pope is happyto be there. That is what art can do. It isnot schizophrenia but it is 2 sets of values,which are healed.

Really, it seams to me that whatarchitecture, I mean I can go on and onand this in India we’ve got a place youmust have heard that mosque that wasnot down and all this that we should makea temple. But you know if you speak toany real scholar, they would tell you thatthe central mythic imagery is the idea ofthe Vestou who fell from the sky brokeninto pieces becoming the metaphor for themountains and many things. And then thebasis right is to putting together, the ritualso that he can ascend back. So this ideaof the centrality and the connection to thesky you see in the dome of the prophet,you see in Christianity, you see inHinduism. It would be wonderful at thistime if we had built a building that told uswhat we all have in common rather thansaying that we are different. It seems tome that this is an issue I wouldn’t reachabout but I do that in that building, peopleare very happy because they feel this is

making an attempt to bring us together. Ido these for my own pleasure. I am not asocial worker but what I am trying to sayis that the banality of our buildings is partlydue to us. It is partly due to society. Youknow the same exhibition I was telling youabout, Jaipur; it was of something calledthe festival of India. I don’t think that camehere but it was a series of exhibitions andwe were asked the four of us to do anexhibition on Indian architecture. India isincredible because we sort of absorbeverything. I think we got the finestcollection of Islamic buildings in the worldexcept maybe Iran. Then if you look atCorbusier, we’ve got some of Corbusier’smain buildings; of course Buddhist Hindutemples, the biggest buildings are in India.So we will run all the way from the oldest5 000 years ago to today. We made a listand it included Louis Khan and everybodyand I thought the old buildings would bebeautiful but the new buildings, Corbusierand others would have the new ideas, theconcepts. But I was wrong. The oldbuildings were not only stunningly beautifulbut they had ideas that made Corbusierlook like contemporaneous because theyspoke of what the society was about, thebasis beliefs of that society. It is strangeyou take something like Boroboudourwhich I think Andre Malreau described asthe greatest building ever. Now if you seethat building it is of 7 layers. It is showingthe 7 levels of nirvana, etc. It is not beautifulin our sense but it tells what that societyis about. In fact Malreau said that the onlyequivalent in Europe would be a cathedrallike Chartre that it also spoke about thatsociety. So I thought why today are webuilding things which have no meaning?And I think it is partly the fault of the societybecause now we are asked to do a 40story office building, a 300 room hotel,how can you put meaning into that? So itis not all our fault but it is also partly ourfault. If we are asked to build a building,which perhaps has the chance to expresssomething, we duck the issue becausewe are so used to express nothing. At

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least that what I felt when I was makingthis exhibition. It was a big turning pointfor me. It was about 18 years ago and itwas not very difficult to see in almost anyprogram we get the possibility ofexpressing something and that is whenthat sentence comes out “we build ourbuildings and then our buildings build us”.If we express nothing we end up in thebanality of what we see in the shoppingmalls, etc. I do not want to go into that. Itis part of our job I think to have theseagendas, which slowly accumulates. Idon’t think you should rush and say I amgoing to express this or that. Slowly livinghere, you will begin to know what you wantto express which will be good and positiveand help heal your society. That is up toyou to decide. But I think that is very muchpart of our responsibility.

Q 4: Part of something that we also allhave in common is really materials; canyou talk us a bit really about materials thatyou use in your architecture?

A 4: We mostly use just brick, concrete,and stones. Those are the materials easilyavailable and affordable. It would beimpossible for us to try to produce the kindof high-tech things, which involves metalsand stuff. We don’t have the budget butwe certainly don’t have the precision. Ittake a whole industrial kind of sub-cultureto support that wonderful railway station.I don’t know if you can build it anywhereexcept in place which have engineeringand production skills. I don’t miss that atall. I don’t think I can do that very well andI am not even interested to do that. I thinkone is interested in trying to do one thingvery important which we were discussingtoday at lunch. I think when I was a youngarchitect in the early 60’s and this is truefor many of us, oh sorry you have aquestion?Q 5: I would really like to congratulate youfor your serious concern to relate yourwork to Indian tradition. You are trying tocreate contemporary Indian architecture.

Having said that, I think I have 2 problemswith your work. One, you made strongreferences to religious connotations whichI find very sensitive in multi-ethnic religiousplace such as India. The secondproblematic issue I find is that yourreference to Indian architectural heritageseems to be very, and I am sorry to say,naïve as opposed to spiritual reference inyour architecture.

A 5: That is pretty devastating! I think thatmaybe you missed the point of what I wastrying to do in the Jaipur building. If youlook at some of these old diagrams, theyhave many meanings but they also speakto you as a 20th century person. They arejust very beautiful ideograms and theyhave this immediately disconnectingquality. When I saw the Mandala drawings,the actual drawings of these things, theyare really magic diagrams. I felt I wouldlike to interpret them and build them todayas though there was no history betweenthen and no. I wasn’t interested in lookingat the temples and say how do we do thisand that. No, if you just go back to thediagram and you build it as a contemporaryinterpretation then it is up to you. I hopeif you get to see the building you will seesome poetic or other qualities in them andthey are there but any way it is up to youbut those spiritual values would comethrough that architectonic level. I am notevoking religion; actually it is a mythic kindof underlay of it all. I think there is not inthe Jaipur building any particular religiousreference. I am interested much more inthe sacred that is in all of us and perhapshas nothing to do with religion. Religionhas used the sacred in all of us.Architecture has to deal with that sacred.I would call the tea ceremony of theJapanese a sacred ceremony; youunderstand what I mean. The bull-fight inSpain is sacred; in that sense they aresacred moves architecture needs to havein a building. It is not religious, no, I woulddeny that completely.

Q 6: I would like to just make anobservation. I think that what is Charlesis speaking about, Craw Young wroteabout when he speaks about archetypes.I don’t believe that it is dealing with religion.I think it is dealing with the basiccomprehension of ultimate reality and howyou sort of diagram that. I believe the typeof things that Charles is suggesting andshowing in his work is probably somethingwhich is sadly truly missing in most of ourworks. One final word I would like to sayabout his work Mandala, that when webegan to deal with this word m-a-n-d-a-l-a, its root means the reintegration of theparts with the whole. That is what hashappened to our societies, we becomefragmented from one another and thesediagrams essentially reunite people andthat I think that is a very important aspectabout the work that Charles is showing. Itis the reintegration of the parts within aunity rather than the dispersion into afragmentation, which we generally exist.I think that those diagrams are Beirut aswell as any part of the world because theyare a typo.