Charles Correa - Mythic Image

Manhattan New York as seen from a boat returning from Ellis Island by John Salatas, 15 April 2017. Retrieved from Wikipedia Commons. This essay is in continuation to reviewing A Place in the Shade by Charles Correa.

The essay starts by letting us know that Correa has become a part of the steering committee in the Aga Khan award. This opens him up to the contemporary outlook of the architectural professional. 

Correa asks what the mythic image is, and the value it holds in the mind of the architect. In a way, it's an extremely helpful ruck sack of ideas and concepts that an architect relies on to come up with solutions for the design. But, at the same time, is a curse that limits the architect to critically look at the site and the context that needs addressing. Constantly with Correa, we see him value and fall back on this topic of site context and its climate.

Correa refers to Islamic architecture and its spread to the east and how it moulded and reinvented itself, as it moved to a new location to suiting the needs and challenges of this new context. The mythic image exists here as well, but the work around it, is something to appreciate. Frank Lloyd Wright is also brought up, his work sought to redefine American housing, something Wright consciously chose to do and how it considered the new context in bringing change to the American look at housing solutions.

Babri Masjid ( © Samuel Bourne, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

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What causes these changes? Correa says two moral shifts cause them, culture and aspirations. A cultural shift is seen as one moves physically or metaphorically, and this shift calls in for a change in the tangible image. Other is the less tangible aspiration, something that might not be achieved. Behind the construction of any structure, is an attached aspiration, ephemeral in its existence.

Other forces of change are climate and technology. Climatic change as a phenomena changes a location, and many of its elements are brought into question, like, is a dome really required in a place of high humidity and rainfall? Or a response much suitable for this can be brought up? Will this change or harm the mythic image attached to this topology? if yes, then is this image in and of itself flawed?

Technology and its ever flowing evolution is also a massive agent of change. A certain element of a structure is brought into question as the technology becomes antique or ceases to exist. Hence, a very conscious decision is needed by the architect in responding to the mythic image in their rug sack.

A diagram from the Mythic Image essay, A Place in the Shade by Charles Correa. Redrawn by author.

The diagram further hammers in the points Correa is focusing on and how they co relate among them to come to the architectural response seen. None are to be avoided or the response becomes ignorant and inept.

Works of Le Corbusier or Louis Sullivan are icons because of these considerations and these works speak for themselves. As they set a cornerstone for the context they were designed for, and set up a legacy for future buildings to draw inspirations from, becoming mythic images themselves. Correa then poses the question to the countries designing mosques for the first time, and how they would approach this unique situation and what mythic images they would establish for themselves.