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Charles Correa: The Reluctant Saint
A talk by Edgar Demello
Speakers
The talk delves not just into the life and work of Charles Correa but also into his ideas and concerns about social equity and justice and that of a spatial democracy. In other words the right of all to participate in the joys of the architectural experience. Most of Charles Correa’s projects have had that unmistakable publicness to them.
The talk is based on the idea of PROPOSITIONS, a device that Charles Correa used as a format for some of his talks. The speaker has set out 5 Propositions and an End Piece. Propositions, are provocative, controversial and sometimes even heretical and therefore need to be challenged. Hopefully they will elicit a lively debate.
THE PROPOSITIONS:
1 The Reluctant Saint:
The Sensuous and the Austere
2 Spatial Democracy:
The City for All
3 The Markers of the Ouevre:
The Three Sentinels
4 Writing Research Academia:
Requisites for a Total Architecture
5 The Walls of Science:
Salk and Champalimaud
End Piece
The end piece is an imaginary coming together of Charles with some of his contemporaries that show the wide range of his interests and the diversity of his friendships. Scientists, artists, poets, writers… only a few of them were his clients.
Speakers
Edgar Demello
Edgar Demello studied at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi and the TH (now TU) in Delft, Holland and worked for Prof. Wilhelm Holzbauer and Prof. Carl Auboeck in Amsterdam and Vienna. He then returned to Bangalore where he grew up to start his own practice and is at it for near 4 decades.
In 2000, as a gesture to the new millennium, he started the Architecture Gallery & Bookshop (tAG&B). It was common ground where practice and academia came together. Students, practitioners, academics. It became a ‘half-way school’ for students, where they experienced how ideas were realised into built-form. It also invited practitioners from other disciplines to enrich the discourse. It lasted for six years before it morphed into CoLab, a virtual gallery for art and architecture with an art curator. TAG&B and CoLab have since brought out 11 folios/posters that investigate current and recurring issues within the discipline.
Presently, and for some time now, he is Adjunct Faculty at the RV College of Architecture in Bangalore. Edgar has been working on children’s books and will shortly be publishing ‘Architecture Fables for Children’.
