Rahul Mehrotra, the architect and Harvard professor, writes within the catalog in regards to the problem of housing. Confronted with hundreds of thousands of refugees, the brand new nations of South Asia ended up proliferating developments that doubled down on centuries of sophistication division. Islamabad was constructed for Pakistan’s army and bureaucratic elites. Refugees and the poor have been settled in Korangi.
There have been a couple of exceptions, like Anguri Bagh and in addition Correa’s Artists’ Village from the early Eighties, in Belapur, on the sting of Navi Mumbai, a brand new metropolis that Correa additionally helped plan. As Mehrotra factors out, Correa acknowledged an natural kind of intelligence within the evolution of Mumbai’s slums and different casual settlements: He took classes from the artistic ingenuity and optimism of individuals making properties for themselves, and concrete areas for shared communities, with few or no means.
Correa tried to codify these classes at Artists’ Village, a settlement of free-standing, whitewashed homes with stone yards and pitched-tile roofs, organized round frequent areas: a lost-cost, low-rise, high-density, incremental improvement for a mixture of totally different lessons.
I collect that Artists’ Village by now has dissolved into the sprawling megalopolis of Navi Mumbai, a bit worse for put on like all ageing developments. However as Correa hoped, it’s nonetheless increasing on the city DNA he planted, upholding his dream for a greater India.
The identical can’t be mentioned in regards to the Corridor of Nations, alas. It was razed one night time in April 2017, after officers on the heritage conservation committee for India’s present prime minister, Narendra Modi, turned a deaf ear to architects and historians all over the world who pleaded to save lots of the venture. The corridor wasn’t sufficiently old to be protected, officers argued, and it wanted to make approach for shiny new improvement.
Within the present’s catalog, Stierli calls the demolition “an act of vandalism” in opposition to a piece of structure that had symbolized a progressive imaginative and prescient of India now “essentially at odds with the Hindu nationalist stance of the current authorities.”
