Ahead of a retrospective show at the RIBA, our critic meets the man whose buildings were designed to beat the elements
The "tube house" in Ahmedabad is a model of contemporary sustainable design. It is shaped such that cool air is naturally drawn through it, leaving via a vent close to the apex of the roof. It's a prototype of low-income housing, and cleverly minimises the number of windows, which are relatively expensive items, while creating a humane and livable interior. It uses readily available building materials and techniques. It shows the sort of thinking for which architects such as Chile's Alejandro Aravena are being lavishly praised.
Except it is not contemporary, but was completed in 1962. It should in fact be spoken of in the past tense – only one was built and it was demolished in 1995. It was the work of Charles Correa, now aged 82 and the subject of a forthcoming exhibition at the RIBA that bills him as "India's greatest architect". Correa defined modern architecture in India, moving on from the monuments that Le Corbusier created in Chandigarh and Ahmedabad in the early years after independence. These works, Correa tells me, "had a huge effect… they were very powerful and very lyrical… they showed that you could be on the cutting edge of architecture right where you lived". His use of concrete and masonry shows their influence, but he makes Le Corbusier's motifs serve his own principles and purposes.
For more than half a century, Correa has been pursuing the idea that buildings should use passive means to protect people against the elements – not mechanical air conditioning and heating, but breezes, shade, orientation, the ability of masonry to absorb heat, and what he calls "using a house in a nomadic way", which means inhabiting different parts at different times of day. He cites as an inspiration the Gamble House, an arts and crafts masterpiece in Los Angeles, which has porches on the south side for sunbathing and on the north side for outdoor sleeping.
Correa has applied these ideas not only to low, single houses but to works such as the Gandhi Ashram in Ahmedabad and the British Council in Delhi, and to high-rise living. His Kanchanjunga apartments in Mumbai, 84 metres high, have courtyards in the air and luxury units that run from one side to the other to create through drafts. It was not an approach as fashionable when he started as it is now. Nor did he learn it at the American architecture schools where he studied in the 1950s, when they were dominated by the steel and glass style of Mies van der Rohe. (Which was "OK," he says, "but you didn't feel any passion.")
He says his influences were both specifically Indian and universal. In India "it is common to be aware how well a building works in terms of temperature. People say: 'I went to so-and-so's house and it was very stuffy.'" Meanwhile there is something you "see all over the world, from igloos to the South Pacific, and all through history", which is "shaping a building in response to environment".
This is not just a practical matter, but to do with the ways that buildings carry meanings ("the wellspring of the imagination comes from climate"). "A great example is the Pantheon in Rome, just stunning, so brilliant", where a large circular hole is placed at the top of the dome, which lets out smoke and lets in a thick shaft of sunlight. It's not something you would do somewhere wetter or colder, but here it also represents "the axis mundi, the sky hitting the Earth – there are so many layers".
Correa was ahead of his time in other ways. His Hindustan-Lever pavilion, for the 1961 international trade fair in Delhi, was a multifaceted structure resembling a piece of crumpled paper that seems to foreshadow the work of Frank Gehry. It wasn't a line he pursued further, however, and after making due recognition that Gehry is not just about funny shapes, he explains: "We understand space in four directions, and the rectangle is something very basic to us. The Vedics, for example, knew that the Earth was round, but they represented it as a square. So when you go into a five-sided room for the first time it's exciting, but if you do it repeatedly you destroy the surprise. The more you change things, the more they stay the same."
More importantly, Correa is interested in the ways that Indian cities work, in their resilience despite their apparently permanent state of crisis, and in ways to improve them without erasing their strengths. "Our cities are among the greatest things that we have; they are part of the wealth of India. They are places of hope. The skills we need are urban skills – we never have to ask the World Bank to send us an expert because our cities already provide them." He quotes the former mayor of the Brazilian city of Curitiba, Jaime Lerner, who said that "cities are not the problem; they are the solution". "Isn't that good?" says Correa.
They can, at the same time, be "miserable". "People sleep on pavements. If we don't change this we won't survive." In the 1960s, Correa helped conceive New Bombay, or Navi Mumbai, an attempt to anticipate the city's immense growth by creating the largest planned city in the world across the bay from the peninsular that holds the historic centre. It is there now, working better than most such plans. Correa is "not very happy" with its appearance – "it looks like nothing on Earth. But I was not very concerned about this. I was more concerned with the energy I could bring by making this new city across the harbour."
Most of what Correa says and does makes eminent sense, yet the mass of new construction does not follow his example now, any more than it did 50 years ago. Then, the tube house was not reproduced in large numbers, as hoped. Today, as Correa puts it, "most of the new buildings are the same old glass buildings", regardless of climate. They just change the specification of glass in hot places. Indian cities, meanwhile, "are being used by politicians to rake off profits. It's quite shocking.
"I don't expect anyone to follow me," he says, "but am I frustrated? Yes, reasonably so."
Charles Correa: India's Greatest Architect is at the RIBA, London W1, Tuesday to 4 September