Charles Correa. Charles Correa
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drama of the building starts with its skyline. Corb always placed the greatest emphasis on the total volume of a building and its silhouette against the sky (as, for instance, the ramp on the roof of the Secretariat which acts like an immense spine holding the marvellously long, fractured, ungainly façade together. Eliminate the ramp and the façade disintegrates into several different buildings.) So also the Assembly; the three elements on the roof—the hyperboloid, the pyramid and the lift-tower—play out a dance-drama against the sky. The hyperboloid is inexpressibly beautiful from a distance—white in the sunlight, yet soft as snow. The three elements pirouette around each other as we approach the building, exchanging positions and crossing back and forth. Finally they recede behind the enormous sweep of the portico.
The other three façades (which form the base of this ‘stage’) are simple; necessarily so, for they must also provide counterpoint to the façade of the Secretariat next door. And so it is the gargantuan portico which gives the building direction, turning it to face the High Court. One enters under the 50 ft high canopy and through the pivoting door (25 sqft!) and the drama of the interior spaces commences. (Corb certainly knows how to provide an entrance; one thinks of the Mill-Owners’ building in Ahmedabad with its ramp reaching out like a long hand to pick passers-by off the road.)
How can one begin to convey a sense of so complex an interior? Study the sections and plans. Even a cursory glance will illustrate how very cunning and sensitive is Corb’s handling of spaces; e.g., his continuous use of the L-shape (the leg of which forms an escape-valve to what would otherwise be a static square). In other words, Corb, like Frank Lloyd Wright, is keenly aware of the distances that can be seen from any given point. By never defining the limits of this vision (the sections and plans are coordinated so that the eye can always see beyond and around the corner), the spaces remain dynamic and uncontained. As one traverses the ramps and platform levels of the forum, one builds up a series of images which are superimposed on the brain, creating an overall pattern of incredible richness.
This is a fundamental technique of Corb’s. The complexity of his architecture is not due to the creation of one single intricate pattern but is rather due to the creation of several different patterns which, through superimposition, generate an indescribable complexity. This can be illustrated by the river façade of the Mill-Owners’ building in Ahmedabad (four separate patterns playing together like instruments in a band), and by the façade of the Secretariat, where a visual tour-de-force is generated by juxtaposing brise-soleil grilles of various patterns and scales. (This technique has also been used in the marble grilles of Fatehpur Sikri and the shoji screens of Japan.) This is not to say that Corb could really have calculated all these effects. What he has done is this: he has been shrewd enough to establish a situation where different patterns can interact. The miracles follow of their own accord, and a complete landscape is generated.
The Forum of the Assembly
And the finest landscape of all lies within the forum in the Assembly building. Here all the major elements are self-supporting, thus necessitating a great many columns rising to a great many different heights. Yet, this articulation of the structural system never borders on mannerism, for Corb is working at a vast scale, and he knows just what he can and cannot do. The columns give rhythm and scale, rising like a great forest in the dulcet light. And it is this light, filtering from above, washing the concrete surfaces, that draws us upward into the higher reaches of the building.
Here the light gets dimmer, the spaces more diffuse. One is walking across large desolate areas, and down strange alleyways, between giant concrete forms. Where are we? At the top of the Duomo? It is a strange moment, an eclectic moment, deeply evocative of an architecture past. Then we emerge on to the roof level and into the dazzling sunlight. Here we are on an immense cobbled piazza, the landscape of Chandigarh lying all around; and like monsters rising above the surface of the sea, emerge the hyperboloid, the pyramid and the lift-tower. The last act of the drama—like the opening of the drama—is played out here against the sky.
The Secretariat
III
How does so complex a building hold visually together? Primarily through the near-exclusive use of a single material: concrete. Much has been written about the brutality of Corb’s architecture and, as evidence, is usually cited his handling of concrete. But Corb’s brutality is, in fact, only one side of the coin; he is much more than that. Any ape can be brutal, and Corb could never be exclusively brutal any more than he could be exclusively elegant. It was essential to his temperament that he express both qualities at the same time. (The Jaoul houses in Paris illustrate this.) It has been said that one understands the hardness of rock only if one knows the softness of silk, and Corb himself reputedly sprinkles his biftek with large granules of kitchen salt. (‘This way I know what salt is and I know what meat is.’) Thus we find that at certain levels of the Assembly—as for instance in the bridge connecting the lift-tower to the top of the hyperboloid—the physical protection provided is quite inadequate. A sense of danger also exists in some portions of Shodan’s house in Ahmedabad, and the question is asked: Why has Corb done this? Yet, try to imagine the same architecture with a safe three-foot-high parapet providing uniform protection all around! Danger, perhaps, is the necessary concomitant of awareness. (And danger has its own rewards: crossing the jungle at night may be a fearsome experience, but it gets you to keep your eyes open, your ears flapping and your senses alert—so that every perception seems far more intense. Corb has understood this.)
The use of contrast, then, to heighten meaning, is an essential technique of Corb’s, and it results in an architecture of great flexibility, making many simultaneous statements, thus covering a wide spectrum of human emotions. Mies van der Rohe—who may be brought in at this point to provide contrast—is an architect who plays with a very limited range of the spectrum; and if he may, for the purpose of analogy, be described as an artist who can take a potato and boil it perfectly, then Corb is certainly the man for a really first-class curry. A Miesian plan brings the simplest elements together in an atmosphere of Olympian calm; it is a space at rest, devoid of any too particular orientation—which, unfortunately through vulgarization, has popularized an effete symmetry that is sweeping across America like diarrhoea. But Corb’s elements are seldom simple or crystal clear; they are usually ambiguous with a myriad overtones; and his buildings, like those of Wright, are never non-directional; they always emphasize their sense of orientation and therefore their sense of life. (The exception perhaps is the museum at Ahmedabad which is his blandest, and weakest, building.)
The Chandigarh Assembly has, in a very large measure, this sense of life. It is an exuberant building, and its impact—its decibel level—is perfectly gauged in scale to its size. In fact, throughout the building, the sense of spatial control is so masterful that it is perplexing that at the climax of the composition, the Assembly chamber itself, Corb falters.
One enters this chamber and one is at the bottom of a gigantic well. The walls swerve upward to a height of over 100 ft. In an attempt to kill this height, Corb has painted the walls in three horizontal bands—red, yellow and white. In an attempt to increase the amount of light reaching the floor (the natural light in the chamber is painfully inadequate), he has used yellow carpets, and further, to break up the monumental space, he has installed green and brown seats alternately in a sort of checkerboard pattern. But to what avail? Even what Lewis Mumford has called the ‘over-ingenious’ mind of Corb cannot gainsay these facts: the Assembly chamber is an unhappy place to step into, and it is a near-impossible Parliament to deliberate in.
What is the reason for this seeming failure? The fluid shape of the hyperboloid is hardly to blame. On the contrary, it is a surprisingly sensible choice and perhaps the only static space which could climax the dynamic images of the Forum areas. Instead, a likely reason for the unhappy state of affairs is the light: Corb has inserted only three openings in the circular roof, and they are supposed to let in direct sunlight only on particular days—the equinox, the solstice, etc. While this surely will make a charming story for a guide book a hundred years hence, it makes impossible conditions for