By Team Mid-Day
“In June 1988 my father, Charles Correa’s practice had completed 40 years, and to commemorate the occasion he decided to do something for the profession. It was then that he thought of giving a gold medal to the undergraduate student of architecture with the best thesis project,” recalls Nondita Correa Mehrotra, director, The Charles Correa Foundation, which recently announced entries for the Charles Correa Gold Medal 2024, an annual award initiated in 1998 by the celebrated Indian architect and urbanist. The medal recognises talent among young students of architecture for their undergraduate thesis project in a first professional degree course. “At that time, it was restricted to colleges near Mumbai. Three to four colleagues would be on the jury with him to select that year’s winner. It was then given at an event — I think the first year it was at the lecture his good friend, the Italian architect Renzo Piano, gave in Mumbai at the UDRI,” she recalls.
With climate change impacting our lives, she reminds us of her father’s vision and why today’s aspiring architects must be serious about it, “Climate responsive design is most likely the leading issue that architects and urbanists need to address. In the last three years, the foundation used the theme ‘Form Follows Climate’, a provocation Charles Correa set out for architects in the 1970s, during the energy crisis, arguing that buildings needed to be responsive to climate. He explained his own work through this lens.” Nondita wants students today to focus on climate, on energy, on low carbon materials.
She is excited with these strong thesis projects that stand out not just for their architectural design but also for their stance on social issues. Nondita revealed about the foundation’s digital repository of all the submitted theses that they call the “Storehouse”. In fact, current students who are preparing to do their theses can refer to the Storehouse on their website. After colleges send in the respective student’s work by August, the foundation will invite a jury for 2024, and the gold medal will be awarded by early November.
This article was originally posted in mid-day on 27 June 2024. Extracted on 27 June 2024 from the original here.