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Born in 1930 in the southern Indian city of Secunderabad, Mr. Correa studied at St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai and then went on to attend theUniversity of Michigan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S. to study architecture.
“To work in India is the great advantage of life in the Third World. The issues are so much bigger than you are; they give you a chance to grow,” Mr. Correa wrote in his book ‘Housing and Urbanization.’
— blogs.wsj.com
Charles Correa died at home Tuesday night in Mumbai, after a bout of brief illness (according to BBC news). He is known for the diversity and far-reaching quality of his work in India and elsewhere, including affordable housing, master planning, and high-profile academic and diplomatic... View full entry
The slum, of course, is the hottest button in urbanism. Beneath the cliché that half the world’s population lives in cities — and that urban populations will double by 2050 — is the fact that only bottom-up informal settlements, or slums, can absorb several billion new residents in the timeframe. [...]
URBZ is notable in that it offers a third way at looking at Dharavi — as both a failure and a better path to success than stillborn smart cities or other attempts at top-down instant urbanism.
— nextcity.org
Related:Will India's 'smart city' initiative exacerbate social stratification?"Great City...Terrible Place": A discussion on the urban future of India View full entry
Out of a super-star list of competitors, a team led by Steven Holl Architects won the competition to design the North Wing -- or the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum -- of the Mumbai City Museum in India. The museum is one of India's leading cultural institutions and is undergoing a renewal process to establish itself as a cultural destination. The new 275 crore (approx $44.3 million) building will include new galleries and facilities. — bustler.net
The Steven Holl Architects team included local architects Opolis Architects, Guy Nordenson & Associates as structural engineers, and Transsolar as sustainability consultants.Learn more about this project on Bustler. View full entry
MoMA began its "Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities" initiative last year aiming to advance international discussion on disproportionate urban development and its potential consequences. To address this issue, six interdisciplinary teams spent 14 months in workshops designing proposals that investigate new architectural possibilities for six metropolises. Each case study will be exhibited to the public at MoMA starting on November 22. — bustler.net
But the discussion doesn't end there. MoMA also created a user-generated Tumblr that collects examples of emerging modes of tactical urbanism taking place in the six cities.Here's a glimpse:LAGOSBy NLÉ (Lagos, Nigeria and Amsterdam, Netherlands)Zoohaus/Inteligencias Colectivas (Madrid, Spain)HONG... View full entry
From this unlikely office, Contractor is helping to create the face of 21st-century India — a nation of flourishing wealth and entrenched poverty that looks, according to the economists Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze, “more and more like islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa.” [...]
Inside the high-rises, several million dollars buys not only granite countertops and Arabian Sea views but also electricity that never goes out and water that always runs.
— nytimes.com
The Chhatrapatri Shivaji International Airport Terminal 2 designed by Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill celebrated its opening late last week in Mumbai. India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, along with visiting dignitaries and representatives from the developer GVK, inaugurated the new terminal... View full entry
Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill Architecture has unveiled plans for Imperial Tower, which would become Mumbai's tallest building and surely one of the world's most slender skyscrapers, should it come to be built.
The 116-story, 400-m (1,300-ft) tall residential skyscraper has a distinctive curved shape, which AS+GG says has been designed to "confuse the wind."
— gizmag.com
Problems...will continue to plague Mumbai as long as the government continues to pretend to put all its faith into a thoroughly planned city-wide manifesto that is ultimately tossed aside... In rethinking the grandiose nature of the Development Plan, perhaps the government can engage in smaller scale implementations and allow new regulations and ideas to...move beyond its paper urbanity. — The Global Urbanist
... a cache of biological samples appeared through the criminal networks of Mumbai, in the vain hope that it might provide new marketable narcotic opportunities. The collective drive and expertise of the refugees managed to turn theses genetically-engineered fungal samples into a new type of infrastructure - providing heat, light and building material for the refugees. Dharavi rapidly evolved it's own micro-economy based around the mushrooms. — tobiasrevell.com