MIT Fall 2009 Architecture Lecture Series:
THE BIG ISSUE
In recent decades, big issues have been often discussed and debated in the field of architecture: from city to climate change, from megaform to infrastructure, even including bigness itself. Has architecture been merely contextualized in a grander theoretical framework or is it beingactually transformed and possibly super-sized by these concerns?
Thursday, October 1, 6:30 pm, Room 34-101
Charles Correa
Architect, Mumbai
Professor, MIT
With Kenneth Frampton (Respondent)
Ware Professor of Architecture, Columbia University
“Propositions"
Over the last four decades, Correa has done pioneering work on urban issues and low-cost shelter in the Third World. From 1970-75, he was Chief Architect for 'New Bombay' an urban growth center of 2 million people, across the harbor from the existing city. In 1985, Prime Minister Rajiv Ganhi appointed him Chairman of the national Commission on Urbanization.
One of the few contemporary architects whose projects address not only issues of architecture but of low-income housing and urban planning as well, his work has been published in many architectural journals and books, including the 1987 Mirmar and the 1996 Thames & Hudson monographs devoted to his work. He has taught at universities both in India and abroad, including Harvard, Penn, Tulane and Washington Universities, and has been the Sir Banister Fletcher Professor at the University of London, the Albert Bemis Professor at MIT, and the Jawaharlal Nehru Professor at Cambridge.
In 1980 Correa was awarded an Honorary doctorate by the University of Michigan, and in 1984 he received the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, in 1987 the Gold Medal of the Indian Institute of Architecture, in 1990 the Gold Medal of the UIA (International Unin of Architects), in 1994 the Praemium Imperiale from Japan, and in 1998 The Aga Khan Award for Architecture.
