When Architects Created Worlds – The New York Times


Architect and Harvard professor Rahul Mehrotra writes in the catalog about the housing problem. Faced with millions of refugees, the new nations of South Asia multiplied developments that doubled the centuries-old class divide. Islamabad was built for Pakistan’s military and bureaucratic elite. Refugees and the poor were settled in Korangi.

Anguri Bagh and also on the edge of Navi Mumbai, a new city Correa helped plan for, were a few exceptions, such as Correa’s Artists Village in Belapur from the early 1980s. As Mehrotra points out, Correa recognized an organic kind of intelligence in the evolution of Mumbai’s slums and other informal settlements: she took lessons from the creative intelligence and optimism of people who built homes for them, and from urban spaces for communal communities with little or no . means.

Correa tried to codify these lessons in the Artists Village, a settlement of detached, whitewashed stone courtyards and tiled roofs organized around communal spaces: a mix of different classrooms.

I understand that the Artists Village has by now turned into the sprawling megalopolis of Navi Mumbai, which, like all aging developments, is a little worse for wear. But as Correa hopes, it still extends the urban DNA it has cultivated and supports the dream of a better India.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the Hall of Nations. It was destroyed one night in April 2017, After officials on the heritage conservation committee of India’s current prime minister, Narendra Modi, heeded architects and historians around the world who beg to save the project. Officials argued that the hall was not old enough to be preserved and should lead to a shiny new development.

In the show’s catalogue, Stierli describes the demolition as “an act of vandalism” against an architectural work that symbolizes a progressive vision of India.



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