Harsh Neotia, Solano Benitez and Rahul Mehrotra talked to NDTV.
"I don't work with developers" and "Malls don't excite me". That's what master architect Charles Correa told Bengal industrialist Harsh Neotia before agreeing to design the City Centre shopping complex in Kolkata's Salt Lake area. On Saturday, Kolkata paid tribute to the master architect on his death anniversary at the very place he designed for the city. Apart from Ms Monika Correa, the event was attended by FICCI president Harsh Neotia, eminent Paraguayan architect Solano Benitez, who recently won the prestigious Golden Lion award in Venice for his work.
Harsh Neotia, chairman of Ambuja Neotia Group, told NDTV, "Mr Correa has been radical in the way he approached the subject. I persuaded him and he relented after seeing my infectious enthusiasm in getting Correa to Kolkata. He designed something and after laying the foundation he tore up the design he had done. In almost fell off my chair and then he came up with this hybrid where we came about this idea of the City Centre. I was a late convert to this idea."
Rahul Mehrotra, Mr Correa's son-in-law and professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, also spoke at the Charles Correa Annual Memorial Lecture to honour the master architect.
Mr Mehrotra told NDTV, "I think Mr Correa's real importance was he was first generation architect in independent India who were kind of rooted in modernity. But he had much deeper interests. One of his greatest interests was to route architecture through culture and climate. He was also concerned with questions of equity and that's why he answered problems of urbanisation and housing and how to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor."
"For him buildings were ideas and he was experimenting and thinking about building differently in a particular context. His work here was a classic example of that. He took the idea of a shopping mall and converted it into what we know as City Centre," Mr Mehrotra added.
Mr Benitez told NDTV, "You can feel the essence of the construction in every single piece of work he did. Charles Correa said construction is not architecture and for architecture to grow you have to care for the people when you think of construction and that is the legacy of Charles Correa."