Charles Correa, 'India's Greatest Architect' (1930-2015)

Correa was born in Secunderabad, India, in 1930. After his studies at St. Xavier College in Mumbai, he traveled to the United States where he received a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Michigan and a Master of Architecture from MIT. In 1958, three years after graduating from MIT, he set up his own practice based in Mumbai.

More than any formal lineage, his work is mose widely known for its diversity, from the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial at the Sabarmati Ashram, to the Jawahar Kala Kendra in Jaipur, and the State Assembly for Madhya Pradesh. He balanced luxury residential projects, like the Kanchanjunga Apartments, with architecture projects that confronted issues of low-income housing and urban planning. From 1970-75, he was Chief Architect for "Navi Mumbai," an urban growth center of 2 million people located across the harbor from the existing city. His success over the decades took him outside of India as well, as evidenced by recent works like the Ismaili Centre in Toronto, the Brain Science Center at MIT, and the Champalimaud Centre for the Unkown in Lisbon, Portugal.

His awards inside and outside of India are numerous, including the Padma Shri and Padma Vibhushan awards (two of the highest civilian awards in India) in 1972 and 2006, respectively, RIBA's Royal Gold Medal in 1984, the Praemium Imperiale of Japan in 1994, and the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1998. Correa was dubbed "India's Greatest Architect" by RIBA in 2013 on the occasion of a career retrospective that displayed a sampling of some of the 6,000 drawings he donated to the institute. It is a monicker that should surely stick as people look back on the work he produced over five productive decades.