Charles Correa and Indian Modernism

Walk through almost any new Indian city and the buildings look as if they could be anywhere: glass towers, sealed apartment blocks, malls without windows. Yet for about four decades after Independence, a group of Indian architects tried to build something different — an architecture that was unmistakably modern but grew out of Indian heat, Indian light, Indian budgets and the way Indian families actually live. That movement is usually called Indian modernism, and its buildings are still among the most visited and studied in the country.

Charles Correa was at the centre of it. His Tube House and Kanchanjunga Apartments are covered in detail in this site's dedicated article on those two buildings. This article steps back to look at the wider picture: what Indian modernism was, who shaped it, where Correa fitted, and the three other works that best show his thinking — the Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya in Ahmedabad, the low-rise housing at Belapur in Navi Mumbai and the Jawahar Kala Kendra in Jaipur. It then translates the lessons into decisions a homeowner or designer can use.

A note on method. Architecture history is full of confident-sounding dates and quotations that are hard to verify. This article keeps to facts that are well established in published sources and in the records of the institutions concerned; where a dimension or detail is given as indicative, it is there to explain an idea, not to describe a measured drawing.

What Indian modernism was

Modern architecture arrived in India in two waves. Before Independence, Art Deco and early modern buildings appeared in Bombay, Delhi and other cities, often designed by Indian and European architects trained abroad. After 1947, modernism became something larger: the architecture of a new nation. Jawaharlal Nehru wanted buildings that looked forward rather than back, and the choice of Le Corbusier to plan Chandigarh, the new capital of Punjab, in the early 1950s, made that ambition visible. At almost the same time Le Corbusier designed four buildings in Ahmedabad — the Mill Owners' Association building, the Sanskar Kendra museum and two private villas — and in the early 1960s Louis Kahn began the campus of the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad.

These foreign masters gave Indian architects a language: exposed concrete and brick, deep shading devices, raw honest materials and bold geometric forms. The Indian architects who worked with them, or studied abroad and came home, then adapted that language. They kept the honesty and the geometry, but bent the buildings towards local climate, local crafts and very tight budgets. That adaptation — modernism made Indian rather than modernism imported — is what makes the period distinctive.

Correa's place in this group is distinctive in three ways. He was more interested in housing and cities than most of his peers, and spent much of his career on mass housing, urban planning and policy. He thought in section — in how air, light and people move vertically through a building — more than in façades. And he wrote a great deal, so his ideas travelled further than his buildings. Doshi, who worked with both Le Corbusier and Kahn, brought craft and spiritual symbolism; Kanvinde brought rigour; Baker brought frugality. Correa brought the sky.

Charles Correa: a short biography

Charles Correa was born in 1930 in Secunderabad, studied architecture at the University of Michigan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and set up his practice in Bombay in 1958. His first major public commission, the Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya at the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, opened in 1963 and established his reputation almost at once. In the early 1970s he was closely involved in planning Navi Mumbai, the new city across the harbour from Mumbai, and in the mid-1980s he chaired the National Commission on Urbanisation set up by the Government of India.

Recognition followed at home and abroad. He received the Padma Shri in 1972 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2006, and the Royal Institute of British Architects awarded him its Royal Gold Medal in 1984. His later works included buildings outside India, among them the Brain and Cognitive Sciences complex at MIT and the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, completed in 2010. His book The New Landscape, published in 1985, set out his ideas on housing, density and open-to-sky space for a wide audience. He died in 2015; the Charles Correa Foundation in Goa continues work on his ideas and archive.

Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya: the museum as a village

The Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya — the museum and memorial at the Sabarmati Ashram, from where Gandhi set out on the Salt March in 1930 — is the best introduction to Correa. A lesser architect might have built a monumental hall. Correa built something closer to a village: a cluster of small square pavilions, each with brick piers, a tiled pyramidal roof and wooden louvres instead of glass, set on a grid and arranged around a central water court. Some pavilions are enclosed rooms for documents and photographs; some are open, roofed shelters; some squares are left as open courts. Visitors move through a sequence of shade and sky, inside and outside, much as they would through the ashram itself.

The design is modest in scale and material, which suits its subject, but it is also a working system. Concrete channels running along the tops of the walls carry rainwater off the roofs and double as beams. Because every unit is the same, the museum could, in principle, grow by adding units without losing its character. And because the walls are low and the louvres open, the pavilions are shaded and ventilated rather than sealed — exactly the qualities Correa would later call form follows climate.

For a home, the Sangrahalaya teaches three practical lessons. First, a small repeated module is easier to build well, to shade and to ventilate than one large volume. Second, the spaces between rooms — courts, shelters, verandahs — are as important as the rooms themselves. Third, materials can be honest and local: brick, tile, timber and water make a building that ages well in the Gujarat climate, where sealed glass and aluminium often do not.

Form follows climate: Correa's five habits

Correa's approach is often summed up in the phrase form follows climate, a deliberate twist on the modernist slogan form follows function. Across his buildings, five habits recur, and each can be used at the scale of a single home. They also explain why his work still looks right in Indian cities, while many glass buildings of the same decades now look out of place.

• Think in section first: decide where air enters low and leaves high, and where the sky enters, before fixing the plan.
• Treat open-to-sky space as real space: courtyards, terraces and verandahs are rooms without roofs, used daily.
• Put a buffer between the room and the weather: a verandah, deep balcony or terrace takes the sun and rain so the room behind does not.
• Build in small increments: a house or a museum that can grow over time costs less up front and adapts to a family's life.
• Design for equity: the lowest-cost house deserves the same care as the most prestigious commission.

The last habit is the least visible and the most important. Correa spent decades arguing that Indian cities could house far more people decently in low-rise, high-density neighbourhoods than in isolated towers, provided each family had its own piece of ground and open-to-sky space. That argument is the subject of Belapur.

Belapur: low-rise, high-density and incremental

In the 1980s Correa designed a housing scheme at Belapur, in Navi Mumbai, that put his ideas about density into practice. Instead of flats in a tower, each family received its own small plot with a house that touches the ground, and could extend the house over time as income allowed. The houses are grouped into small clusters around a shared courtyard, and the clusters are grouped around larger courts, building up a hierarchy of open spaces from the private yard to the neighbourhood square. Plot sizes vary so that families of different incomes live side by side rather than in separate estates.

Published descriptions commonly describe the basic cluster as about seven houses around a courtyard of roughly 8 × 8 m, with three such clusters forming a larger group around a court of roughly 12 × 12 m. The exact numbers matter less than the logic: each step up in scale adds a larger shared open space, so a child can play within sight of home, neighbours meet in the cluster court, and the whole community gathers in the bigger squares. The houses are separate, so a family can add a room or a floor without affecting neighbours' walls.

Belapur's lessons apply directly to the row-house and plotted societies common in Surat, Ahmedabad, Vadodara and Rajkot, and to the low-rise gated communities being built on the edges of many Indian cities. A society laid out as long parallel rows with a single clubhouse wastes open space; the same land arranged as clusters around small courts gives every home a shared outdoor room within a few steps, safer play for children and more shade. And a house designed to grow — with a staircase placed so that a future floor can be added, and structure sized for it — is far cheaper than a house that must be demolished to expand.

Jawahar Kala Kendra: a plan drawn from a city and the cosmos

The Jawahar Kala Kendra in Jaipur, an arts and crafts centre completed in the early 1990s, is Correa's most symbolic building. Its plan is a square divided into nine smaller squares. The nine-square diagram has a long history in Indian thought as a mandala, associated with the nine planets of the navagraha. It also has a direct link to Jaipur itself: the eighteenth-century city founded by Sawai Jai Singh II was laid out on a grid of large squares, with one square moved out of position to fit the site. Correa repeated that move, shifting one of the building's nine squares outward to form the entrance, so the arts centre carries the plan of the city that surrounds it.

Each square houses a different part of the programme — galleries, a theatre, a library, a café, offices — and each is associated with one of the planets through its colour, symbols and use. At the centre, the middle square is left open to the sky as a kund, a stepped open space that recalls the stepwells and temple tanks of Rajasthan and Gujarat. The open centre is the building's living room: shaded at its edges, open above, used for performances and simply for sitting. It is open-to-sky space at the heart of a public building.

For homes, Jawahar Kala Kendra is a reminder that the traditional Indian nine-square plan — familiar from Vastu Purusha Mandala diagrams and from courtyard houses with a central open chowk — is not only a symbolic device. It is a practical way to organise rooms around a shaded, open centre that lights and ventilates everything around it. Many bungalow plans can be read as a nine-square grid with the middle square kept open or double-height; the question is whether the centre is truly open to the sky, or sealed under glass.

From modernism to today's homes

Indian modernism lost ground from the 1990s, as liberalisation, rising land prices and cheap air-conditioning favoured sealed towers, glass façades and imported images. The architects who carried its ideas forward — and there are many — now usually describe their work as climate-responsive, contextual or sustainable rather than modernist. But the core of what Correa and his contemporaries did is easy to recognise in good contemporary Indian homes: courtyards and light wells, deep verandahs, shaded west faces, exposed brick and local stone, rooms that open to terraces, and plans that can grow.

Translating those ideas into a modern flat or bungalow is mostly a matter of dimensions and priorities, not money. The table below gives practical sizes and indicative October 2026 costs, consistent with this site's article on the Tube House and Kanchanjunga. Aaditya Interior uses this kind of checklist at the concept stage of bungalow projects in Gujarat, where the difference between an open and a sealed court is the difference between a house that breathes and one that needs air-conditioning by mid-morning.

Legacy and what comes next

Correa's buildings are now studied in every Indian architecture school, and their ideas have been absorbed into energy codes and green-building ratings that reward shading, daylight and natural ventilation, such as the Bureau of Energy Efficiency's Eco-Niwas Samhita and the GRIHA and IGBC rating systems. Computer simulation now lets designers test the airflow in a section before it is built, so the intuition behind the Tube House can be checked and refined. At the urban scale, the debate he joined — towers or low-rise, high-density neighbourhoods — is very much alive as Indian cities expand.

The risk, as with any admired architect, is imitation without understanding: a sloping roof without a vent, a courtyard sealed under glass, a sky terrace with an air-conditioned glass box behind it. Correa's real legacy is a set of questions rather than a set of shapes. Where does the hot air go? Where does the sky come in? What happens between the room and the weather? Can this house grow with the family? Any home that answers those four questions well belongs to the tradition he helped create.

Rules for borrowing from Indian modernism

• Draw a section at the concept stage and mark where air enters low and leaves high.
• Give every bungalow at least one true open-to-sky space with drainage — never seal it under fixed glass.
• Put a buffer — verandah, deep balcony, terrace or screen — in front of every hot-side room.
• Use a regular structural grid so rooms can be added without demolition.
• Prefer local, honest materials that age well in heat and monsoon: brick, stone, lime, terracotta, timber.
• Plan societies as clusters around small courts rather than long rows around one distant garden.
• Keep the centre of a house open or double-height wherever the plan allows.
• Judge any climate feature by what it does — shade, air, rain — not by how it looks in a render.

Frequently asked questions

Who are the main architects of Indian modernism?

The foreign architects who shaped it were Le Corbusier, in Chandigarh and Ahmedabad, and Louis Kahn, at IIM Ahmedabad. The leading Indian modernists include Achyut Kanvinde, B. V. Doshi, Charles Correa, Raj Rewal and Laurie Baker, along with many others who designed institutions, housing and homes across the country from the 1950s onwards.

What is Charles Correa's most famous building?

The most widely cited are the Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya at the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, Kanchanjunga Apartments in Mumbai and the Jawahar Kala Kendra in Jaipur. The Tube House in Ahmedabad, a small low-cost prototype, is equally important for his ideas about natural ventilation.

What does form follows climate mean?

It is Correa's adaptation of the modernist idea that form follows function. It means that in a hot country the basic shape of a building — its section, depth, openings and relationship to the sky — should come from the climate, so that the building shades and ventilates itself before any machine is switched on.

What is special about Belapur housing?

It shows that low-rise housing can reach high density while giving each family its own plot, its own house and the freedom to extend it. Houses are grouped around small shared courts, which group around larger courts, creating a hierarchy of open spaces from the private yard to the neighbourhood square.

Is the Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya open to visitors?

Yes. It is part of the Sabarmati Ashram complex in Ahmedabad and is open to the public. Visiting hours and any redevelopment works at the ashram should be checked with the Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust before a visit.