When we are talking about climate change, one of the challenging parts is to communicate the context and its effects clearly.

“It’s getting hotter.”
“The rains are changing.”
“By how much? Over how long?”

But what does that actually mean?

How much hotter?
Compared to when?
Over what period of time?
And most importantly: how do you make people feel the reality of something that unfolds slowly across decades?

This is where documentation becomes important. The challenge is no longer just proving climate change exists; it is making gradual change visible.

Climate change is difficult to document because it rarely appears as a single dramatic event. Unlike an earthquake or a cyclone, its impacts unfold slowly, often across years or decades. Temperatures rise incrementally, coastlines shift centimetre by centimetre, seasons become less predictable, and weather patterns grow increasingly unstable. Individually, these changes can feel insignificant. Collectively, they alter ecosystems, economies, cities, and everyday life. 

Humans are not naturally wired to notice slow transformations. We respond to immediate danger and visible disruption. A flooded street after heavy rainfall is memorable, but a steady rise in average annual temperature is abstract. Data alone often fails to create emotional understanding because numbers require interpretation. A graph showing a 1.5-degree increase over decades may be scientifically alarming, yet for many people it remains detached from lived experience. Documentation, therefore, becomes more than record keeping; it becomes a bridge between evidence and perception. 

An example of this is the climate stripes created by Ed Hawkins, which are sequences of colored bars where each stripe represents a year, and the colour represents temperature. Blue years are cooler; red years are warmer. There are no complicated axes or technical explanations. Yet the movement from blue to deep red communicates warming instantly. The visualisation works because it transforms data into intuition. People understand the pattern emotionally before they process it analytically.

At the same time, documentation also shapes public behaviour. People are more likely to respond to climate change when they can relate it to everyday life. Scientific reports may establish credibility, but stories build connection. Images of shrinking lakes, recurring floods, or forests damaged by wildfire communicate urgency in ways statistics alone often cannot. Documentation influences how societies remember events, assign responsibility, and demand action. Without records, environmental loss risks become normalised. Each generation adjusts its expectations based on the conditions it grows up with, a phenomenon often referred to as “shifting baseline syndrome.” What once seemed alarming gradually becomes accepted as ordinary simply because there is no visible memory of what existed before. 

This makes documenting climate change not only an act of communication but also an act of preservation. It preserves evidence of landscapes, lifestyles, and ecological systems that may disappear or transform over time. More importantly, it preserves accountability. It creates a continuity between the past and the present, helping people recognise that climate change is not an isolated incident but an ongoing process shaped by human activity.

In many ways, the challenge of documenting climate change is also a challenge of storytelling. It requires translating scientific complexity into forms that people can emotionally and socially understand without oversimplifying the issue. Data is necessary, but data alone is rarely enough. To truly communicate climate change, documentation must combine evidence with lived experience, observation with memory, and statistics with stories. Only then can gradual change become visible enough for societies to acknowledge, understand, and respond to it.

This idea of documenting not only climate crises, but also the realities and responses emerging from them, strongly connects with the theme of Nagari’s 2026 short film competition, Sustainable Futures for a Changing Climate. This year’s edition invites filmmakers to explore resilience within Indian cities and document both the visible and invisible ways communities are adapting to a changing environment. By focusing on stories of innovation, survival, and everyday resilience, the competition highlights the importance of documenting climate change not just through statistics and warnings, but through people, places, and lived experiences.

More information about the competition and this year’s theme can be found on the Nagari website.

– Written by Dainty Doe Justin, Research Fellow, CCF

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This blog traces how Bangalore’s weather has changed over time and how the urban fabric has responded to it. Climate change arrives not as a crisis but as a daily inconvenience, its effects falling unevenly across a city’s residents. From disappearing tree canopy to unequal public spaces, it asks what a liveable Bangalore means and for whom.

There isn’t a clear moment when a city becomes difficult to live in. Growing up in Bangalore, the weather was the city’s personality. People moved here for it, stayed because of it, and measured everything else — the traffic, the concrete, the chaos — against it. The garden city narrative wasn’t just nostalgia. It was a lived baseline, a set of conditions that shaped how the city was used: when you went out, how long you stayed, whether you needed to think about it at all. The streetscape was lined with trees, the footpaths were still walkable, there were only one or two IT hubs where the predominant traffic would be, and there was a very distinct character between residential neighbourhoods and enclaves.

Somewhere along the way, those same residential streets stopped feeling like neighbourhood spaces and started feeling like overflow spaces for the city’s expansion. Houses grew taller, vehicles multiplied, construction became constant, and the sense of familiarity that people once depended on became harder to hold onto. The frustration often gets directed at the people arriving in the city, when in reality, the deeper issue may be that the city is expanding faster than its infrastructure and climate resilience can keep up with.

And this shift didn’t arrive all at once; it accumulated: afternoons that keep you indoors now, a commute that requires covering yourself up, the unconscious rerouting away from stretches where the canopy has thinned. These feel like small adjustments, but they aren’t.

What’s harder to see is that the connection between the feeling and the cause keeps getting lost. Climate change arrives at your doorstep disguised as inconvenience. The air quality that makes you reach for a mask, the heat that kills the urge to walk, the drizzles that have now become hailstorms. Each of these has a story behind it, decades of expanding built-up land, shrinking green cover, rising temperatures, but that story rarely surfaces inside the experience of just getting through the day. Every day routines have made these seem natural and unnoticed. And this, repeated across people and years, becomes the new normal without ever being chosen.

And these effects don’t fall evenly. In a city whose biggest problem is traffic, enhancing public transport and enabling people to use it is one thing. But a bus stop in Jayanagar, where you’re sheltered by trees, softens the heat and the overall microclimate, whereas a bus stop on the Outer Ring Road offers no canopy, no shelter, constant honking, and dust from construction. The uncomfortable part is that those of us with the most capacity to care have also built the most insulation from urgency.

But that insulation only buffers the symptom without naming the cause. Meanwhile, the people absorbing the full weight of these shifts have no option. Heat means more water needed, more rest needed, more basic dignity needed, and the city’s infrastructure isn’t keeping up. As temperatures rise, minor amenities become survival infrastructure for people who are out and about, like the waste worker, the traffic police, and the street cleaner. The people most exposed to the changed city are the least likely to have their experience heard. And yet none of that registers in how the city talks about itself.

Bangalore still speaks of its weather as though it were a permanent feature, a selling point, an identity. But increasingly it sounds more like a memory than a reality. And somewhere in that gap, between what the city claims to be and what it is becoming, a harder question emerges: not simply how cities survive climate change, but what kinds of social and public life remain possible within them. If sustainability is meant to describe a liveable future, then Bangalore increasingly forces the question: how does a city begin to respond to a climate that has already changed what it means to live there?

– Written by Flora Marianne, Senior Fellow, CCF

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This blog explores how traditional Goan houses and building methods embody a deep climatic intelligence that often goes ignored through contemporary shifts in construction, creating spaces that might not be suitable for elderly residents who spend much of their time within the home.

As avó moved through the house at an unhurried pace, each small task eventually drew her back to the balcão (verandah), where she sat reading the morning paper, rising only at the sound of the poder calling out down the street. Her feet felt cool as they rested against the red-oxide floors, as a gentle breeze drifted in through this space and escaped through the terracotta tiled roof above. This quiet passive cooling, woven into the very structure of the house, carried a comfort, even in the peak of the 12 o’clock sun, capable of lulling one into an afternoon sleep. As the hours passed, she remained seated there, greeting passersby and exchanging fragments of conversation with neighbours who occupied the same narrow threshold at the edge of their own homes.

This “third space”, as one could call it, is drawn back from the harsh glare of the sun and held beneath deep overhangs, a narrow strip between the privacy of the home and the public street, carrying with it a softness that allows for the elderly to rest and occasionally yell at each other to send over missing ingredients. It is within these quiet elements that the spirit of “susegad”, a term familiar in the Goan household as an unhurried way of living, is gently sustained. Repeated from house to house, these balcões stretched along the street as a continuous social edge, stitching individual homes into a larger collective rhythm of living.

Yet the comfort of this edge does not exist in isolation. The entire module of the Goan house is shaped through a nuanced understanding of climate, where every element works to mitigate heat and make daily life much gentler for its residents, particularly those who often spend long hours within the home. What may appear informal to the eyes of a formally trained designer is, in reality, a settlement shaped over time through lived experience and an intimate understanding of what works. This way, it maintains a delicate balance between Goan’s insatiable need to connect and a retreat from the unforgiving sun.

Slowly, almost unnoticed, this language begins to fall apart under the pretence of a more contemporary model of living. The very house that once negotiated Goa’s heat through shade, breeze, and breathable materials is increasingly replaced by sealed interiors and dependence on mechanical cooling. The lime-plastered walls that were capable of releasing moisture through the gruelling humidity are replaced with modern cement that traps moisture within, causing the laterite to decay slowly from the inside out [1]. The house eventually dies. The cool red-oxide floors beneath avó’s feet give way to polished vitrified tiles that hold neither memory nor relief from the heavy afternoons. Oyster shell windows, which once softened daylight and allowed the house to breathe gently, are exchanged for large panes of glass that trap the glare and relentless heat within sealed interiors. The terracotta roof disappears beneath concrete slabs, and the heat that once escaped upward now lingers heavily inside the house. The shift in material slowly intensifying the unbearable heat within. Even as the balcão disappears, liminal spaces collapse, and the house slowly turns inward. Very often, spaces like these are sacrificed in favour of privacy, and with them disappear the permeability and quiet social life that once defined the street.

Now, Avó no longer sits beneath the shade of a cool verandah, half watching the road and half listening for the gossip in the distance. Instead, she sits within an enclosed hall under the constant hum of an air-conditioner, separated from the neighbours who were once as much a part of her day as the floor beneath her feet. The air no longer drifts through the house as the windows remain shut, conversations do not spill onto the street, and the susegad life she lived begins to retreat quietly behind closed walls. In losing these threshold spaces, the elderly are not merely losing a balcão, but the very spatial condition that once supported their manner of living. For them, the home extends far beyond its physical enclosure. It acts as a place of physical and psychological security, a setting for routine, observation, and everyday connection, and the traditional Goan house accommodated these needs instinctively. Designing for the geriatric community, then, is not simply a specialised concern but an inevitable one, because ageing is a condition every household will eventually encounter. The tragedy lies in the fact that, even as the climate grows harsher, the very architectural wisdom developed to negotiate Goa’s heat is being discarded. The heat has not disappeared; it has intensified. Yet the spatial responses that once softened it are steadily vanishing in the contemporary city.

In many ways, Goa already possesses a handbook of solutions for living within its climate, one embedded within the everyday building practices passed down across generations. But as temperatures rise and cities grow denser, this climatic intelligence becomes steadily overlooked within new approaches to shaping our cities. We must not forget that, no matter the place, a solution to adapt to the changing climate may exist in the inherent wisdom of a vernacular; something that has allowed a community to thrive for hundreds of years.

Glossary
Avó – Grandmother
Poder – A traditional Goan bread seller/ baker.
Geriatric – Someone of advanced age.
Susegad – A relaxed, contented, and slow-paced way of life.
Balcão / Balcões – A traditional, covered front porch of Goan-Portuguese houses.

References:
[1] “Intangible foundations: The forgotten hands that shaped Goa’s heritage”  The Goan Everyday, April 2026 https://www.thegoan.net/life-sunday/intangible-foundations-the-forgotten-hands-that-shaped-goas-heritage/146771.html

– Written by Gabriela Marie Gomes, Research Fellow, CCF
All images have been illustrated by the author.

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A think-piece that discusses the simultaneously global and local facets of the climate crisis, how India’s urban centers are uniquely placed to address it, and the incredible opportunity that documentary filmmakers have to bring out untold climate stories.

A breakdown of climate is no longer a distant, looming threat that awaits us somewhere over the horizon. It is a critically defining condition of the present. Across the world, rising temperatures, extreme weather events, the slow collapse of ecosystems, and resource insecurity are reshaping how societies live, work, and survive. We are not approaching a climate crisis, we are already living in its early stages.

Is Climate Change Already Reshaping Indian Cities?

Few countries embody a diversity of climatic conditions and vulnerabilities as India does, where complex realities vividly unfold with particular intensity. With its rugged mountain ranges, thousands of kilometres of coastline, deserts, forests, river systems, and floodplains, the country exists across multiple ecological worlds simultaneously. At the intersection of these landscapes are its urban centers; sprawling megacities, industrial towns, rapidly expanding fringe regions, and smaller settlements often overlooked in mainstream climate discourse. Each of these experiences a different facet of the changing climate.

In cities such as Surat and Patna, increasingly severe flooding threatens already fragile urban infrastructure. Gurgaon experiences record-breaking heat waves in one half of the year, and in the other, hazardous air quality amid sharply dropping temperatures. Himalayan towns such as Gulmarg and Shimla confront landslides, erratic snowfall, and a subsequent decline in economy-driving tourism. Smaller cities across central India face water scarcity, failing agricultural systems, and heat stress with far fewer resources for adaptation. Climate change in India is a deeply uneven experience, shaped by geography, class, labour, caste, and access to essential services and infrastructure.

Why is Climate Change in India a Justice Issue?

This disparity reveals a difficult truth about the climate crisis: it is fundamentally an issue of justice. We already live in a world of climate apartheid — the astonishing inequality where those who contribute least to planetary warming fall first in the line of crisis, and are affected the worst. Coastal communities, informal workers, agricultural labourers, indigenous populations, and the urban poor are disproportionately exposed to the consequences of ecological collapse, while the more privileged continue to buffer themselves from the immediacy of these impacts.

Climate change, therefore, cannot be viewed as solely an environmental issue. It must also be studied through the lens of human rights. Questions of housing, clean water, public health, migration, labour, and access to safe living conditions are now inseparable from climate realities. The climate crisis is not only about endangered ecosystems, it is about endangered ways of life.

And yet, much of the global discourse around climate change remains abstract, dominated by statistics, international agreements, emissions targets, and technical jargon. While these frameworks are essential, they fail to capture the lived realities of communities navigating environmental change on a daily basis. The challenge before us is not simply to understand climate change as a planetary phenomenon, but to recognise how the planetary crisis manifests locally, intimately, and unevenly.

How Can Documentary Filmmaking Help Climate Storytelling? 

‘Thinking global, acting local’ — this phrase reflects the dual nature of climate action in itself. The systems driving ecological collapse are global: mass industrialisation, fossil fuel dependency, extractive economies, unsustainable consumption. But adaptation, resilience, and survival are always local. They emerge in the cracks; the creative design of neighbourhoods and transport systems, inventive approaches to housing and waste management, set against the backdrop of activated public spaces and strong community networks.

We are storytellers by nature, and societal transformation is most strongly affected by a change in narrative. This is where documentary filmmaking, particularly short-form documentary work, becomes an incredibly relevant method of climate engagement and action. Film possesses a unique ability to connect abstract global systems to the lived experience of local realities, playing a critical role as the ‘translator’ of climate change. Documentaries humanise, and allow audiences to grasp the emotional, social, personal, and political dimensions of such an unfathomable issue. In India’s vast diversity, short-form documentaries also create a space to visualise the hidden and most intimate of narratives, across regions and languages, all tying into a larger planetary condition.

Thinking Global, Acting Local in India’s Climate Crisis

To think globally today is to recognise the interconnectedness of ecological collapse. To act locally is to understand that meaningful responses emerge from communities, places, and practices. The climate crisis calls for both perspectives simultaneously. The choices made within India’s urban centers will shape not only the country’s environmental future, but the conditions of justice, survival, and coexistence in the years to come. In the planetary space between the global and the local lie the climate stories for filmmakers to seek out, ones that speak of solutions for a sustainable, equitable, and ultimately more humane future.

References:
Environmental Justice Foundation. (2021). A Manifesto to Combat Global Heating. EJF. https://ejfoundation.org/resources/downloads/EJF-Climate-Manifesto.pdf

– Written by Amrita Goyal, Research Fellow, CCF

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The sea doesn’t disappear all at once. It retreats slowly, quietly, until one day the docks feel too still. For India’s coastal fishing communities, that slow retreat is already underway. The sea is changing: warmer, less predictable, and increasingly unkind to those who know it best. What happens when the sea changes faster than the people who depend on it can adapt?

I have lived along the coast all my life. The sea has been the one constant, the thing I orient myself with, the smell that means coming home. The fish markets, the docks, the boats going out before dawn; these were just part of the landscape I grew up in. On a recent visit to the docks, something made me pause… Fewer boats than I remembered. Not dramatically fewer, nothing so sudden. It was the kind of reduction that sneaked up on you, and things gradually became normal before you noticed they were ever different. That stillness at the dock made me wonder, which sent me looking for answers

India’s coastline runs approximately 11,000 kilometres, and every stretch of it is home to a community that has read the sea like a rhythm for centuries. The Mukkuvas of Kochi, the Kolis of Mumbai, and the Jalaris of Vizag are not just fishermen but living repositories of wisdom. They know which wind brings the rain and which current carries the sardines. This fluency has been passed down so long that it doesn’t feel like information anymore. It is instinct, but the sea, those instincts were built for, is not the same sea anymore… Rising water temperatures, erratic monsoons, and disrupted fish migration are quietly dismantling what generations built.  

The Indian Ocean, specifically, has been sounding alarm bells since the early 2000s. The Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) has issued marine heatwave alerts across six basins, including the Arabian Sea, which lines the entire western coast, the most recent in April 2026, its most widespread alert yet. The world’s oceans absorb nearly 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases, and the upper layers are warming at a rate with no historical parallels, though marine heatwaves don’t announce themselves with drama. They are invisible upheavals. The coral reefs bleach, plankton dynamics shift, and fish crucially move. They migrate to cooler waters, away from where the nets are, away from where the boats go.

The Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI) in Kochi, for instance, went directly to the fishing communities. What the fishermen noticed was stark: an average of six species had simply vanished from their usual catches. Not shifted… not reduced… but gone from the nets entirely. The study mapped this district by district, finding declining fish populations across most of Kerala, with fishermen in Thiruvananthapuram and Alappuzha reporting particular difficulty predicting wind patterns and safe fishing windows. In Ernakulam, the crisis has precipitated a loss of workdays and falling income. The data added another dimension: fishing days in Kerala fell by 46 percent following Cyclone Ockhi in 2017. The communities weathering the sharpest consequences of a warming ocean are almost entirely unprepared for it.

When catches fall and fishing windows become unpredictable, the first thing that shifts is the work itself. Many have started to move into allied trades: boat repair, fish vending, and loading work at the docks. The National Innovations in Climate Resilient Agriculture (NICRA), a project initiated by the CMFRI, to address the slow erosion of livelihood and to build practical capacity. They focused on what rising sea temperatures mean for fish distribution and what fishermen can realistically do differently. On the ground, this translated into ice boxes for fisherwomen to extend the shelf life of catch in warming conditions, along with the provision of gillnets, cast nets, and seabass seeds to widen what communities could harvest.  

Whether these interventions have been enough is difficult to gauge. Initiated in 2024, the NICRA project in Ernakulam remains a localised effort, its reach too limited to draw broader conclusions. What is clear is that an ice box extends the shelf life of a catch; it does not restore the catch itself. Seabass seeds and cast nets diversify what a community can harvest, but they do not replenish the species that have already gone from the nets. These are thoughtful, ground-level responses to an immediate crisis. However, the gap between what is being done and the scale of disruption remains wide. Which brings the question back to the coastline, all 11,000 kilometres of it.

Kochi is one city, the Mukkuvas one community, and the Arabian Sea one basin among many that are warming; fishing communities all across the coast are navigating a sea that is behaving differently. Indian fishing communities collectively represent millions of livelihoods. However, the policy infrastructure around them — insurance coverage, early warning systems, climate adaptation support, among others — has not kept pace with the changes. CMFRI’s work in Kochi points towards what a more complete, cohesive response could look like: research that listens to fishermen, interventions that meet communities where they are. What remains to be seen is whether the solutions being implemented can keep pace with the urgency the situation demands.

-Written by Aarushi Senthil Kumar, Research Fellow, CCF

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A meandering journey through the archives of one of Charles Correa’s most significant institutional projects.

One of the many courtyards that organize IUCAA’s masterplan. Photograph taken by Mahendra Sinh.

For a novice, at least in the complex fields of astronomy and astrophysics, the most gripping part of outer space is its scale — the sheer enormity, the vastness, the dizzyingly unfathomable extents of ‘nothingness’. Working with an archival masterplan of the Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, or IUCAA, gave me the same feeling of disorientation. Completed in the early 1990s, IUCAA was the second ‘Inter-University Center’ (IUC) — autonomous centers set up by the University Grants Commission designed to act as national coordinating bodies to create centralised facilities that could be shared by all universities. In July 1988, IUCAA was granted 8 hectares of land near Pune University, and Charles Correa was chosen to design the buildings.

Reading a plan for the first time is a bit like learning the rhythm of an unfamiliar song, and this one — especially at the masterplan scale — was particularly elusive. Correa himself¹ describes the structure of the plan as more organic than a strict grid;

“an axis which is actually shifting, yet not breaking off at any point…”

The very apparent asymmetry that this generates is what makes the building contemporary. Compounding this was the sheer scale of the institute; in 1992, just 4 years after being granted a site, it stood as a mammoth 150,000 square foot campus.

The 3 sites of IUCAA, with the central institute, interspersed by campus roads. Archival drawing from the Charles Correa Archives.

When a project is studied as a process rather than an outcome, a retrospective curation becomes all the more complex. Every line I drafted was accompanied by a lingering angst – that I was not correctly capturing the original intention of the architect, that the wall itself was built differently than the drawing, that there was somehow more to these walls that I was blissfully unaware of. This was when I took a deep dive into ‘the IUCAA story’ – how it had been written about, spoken about, critiqued – essentially positioning it in its context. It was quite evident that collaboration must have been essential for a project of this scale to have been executed in such a short time. After realising that Correa accepted the project on the condition that the scientists worked with him to bring the imagery and concepts of astronomy into the builtform, I knew that these were the tenets of this institute, and what made it so unique.

But what does this abstraction – the ‘cosmos’, the mandala – mean for an architect? Correa’s translation of concepts into architectural gestures was not an act of force or imposition, but rather an acceptance of the land, the trees, and the terrain. While IUCAA is known for its imagery, such as the Foucault pendulum and its spiral staircase, there are much subtler nuances that catch one by surprise.

The ‘sweeping lines’ of black stone, articulated as black walls. Archival sketch by Charles Correa, from the Charles Correa Archives.

The first gesture that I noticed in the plan was the sweeping lines – articulated as imposing black walls that are meant to draw a visitor in. Even a CAD drawing reflects the sure movement of the hand that sketched them. An elevation revealed the layers of the walls: local basalt at the base, followed by courses of a blacker kuddapah, and topped finally by glossy black granite, described by Correa² as

“black on black on black – the infinity of outer space.”

Three layers of black stone allude to the increasing ‘blackness’ of outer space.
L: Archival drawing from the Charles Correa Archives | R: Photograph taken by Rahul Mehrotra.

As I worked my way through the rigour and complexity of the masterplan one block at a time, the organic nature of the grid, flowing and bending for light and openings, began revealing itself. A conscious effort was made to treat each block not as an isolated entity but a part of a system, understanding the whole as much more than the sum of its parts but also the part itself as a whole. The play of scale — unapologetically cosmic one minute and tenderly humane the next — beautifully parallels a layperson’s understanding and perception of the ‘cosmos’.

Slowly, the distinctly ‘Correan’ aspects of the project started to emerge. The interplay of volume and void, the articulation of spaces around courtyards: places in the sun and shade, so to speak. The variation in these open spaces is reminiscent of the hierarchy of courtyards in Belapur Housing, built in Navi Mumbai just a few years prior (the project was completed in 1986, two years before IUCAA began).

L: The play of scale is beautifully seen in the statues in the central courtyard. Photograph taken by Rahul Mehrotra.
R: The figure-ground plan depicts the interplay of volume and void. Archival drawing from the Charles Correa Archives.

The largest of these courtyards — the central square — takes the form of a ‘kund’, or well; another clear indicator of its architect. However, rather than being filled with water, the kund is bound by a delicate pattern of granite steps, with stones set into the grass along one diagonal, almost flying apart. On investigating this further, I saw the careful balance between the allusion to astral imagery and the grounding of an architectural gesture – in this case, directionality.

The stones that span the diagonal of the kund ‘fly apart’ with energy.
L: Archival drawing from the Charles Correa Archives | R: Photograph taken by Mahendra Sinh.

This kund was intended as a metaphor for the expanding universe: the stones are ‘bursting’ with centrifugal energy but also set a directional axis that leads to other facilities in the centre of campus.

The two ‘Pillars of Charles’³ which flank the narrow path at the entrance – columns of exposed concrete melting into the powder blue of the sky – hold the anecdotal memory of one of the young architects in Correa’s office who had climbed the column and poured blue paint on it. These pillars reappear almost 30 years later in an institution halfway across the world; the Champalimaud Centre in Lisbon.

The ‘Pillars of Charles’ at IUCAA in Pune (left) and at the Champalimaud Centre in Lisbon.
L: Photograph taken by Rahul Mehrotra | R: Photograph taken by Colin Mosher.

When I studied the dome that lies to the west of the kund, I saw that it was quite literally a reflection of the heavens. The scientists at IUCAA had calculated, through complex mathematics, the exact distribution of stars as they existed in the sky the day IUCAA’s foundation stone was laid — 8.30 pm on December 29 1988. This ‘star pattern’ was then mapped onto the dome, where small pieces of glass were placed before it was cast. The finished dome was painted black on the inside, creating the effect of standing in bright daylight under a bedazzled, ‘starry’ sky. Far from being alien and unknown, IUCAA now felt so familiar; I could see how astronomers sometimes referred to faraway stars as their friends.

The bedazzled dome with glass-puncture stars of sunlight. Photograph taken by Mahendra Sinh.

If, as Correa describes⁴, “the entire building is like a painting”, then its archival study has been more like a dance. My perception of scale transformed from the disorientation of reading the masterplan to the intimate familiarity I had with each block and its unique gestures. In reconstructing from the Archives, engaging with the project clarified my responsibility: not to recreate the most correct drawing or convey the most accurate version of events, but rather to tell a story — to someone who may not speak the language of space, architectural or scientific. One where the collaborative nature of the program was first reflected in its design and construction, where symbology, science, and structure found a common home.

The story of IUCAA.

– Written by Amrita Goyal, Research Fellow

IUCAA is one of close to 200 projects that the CCF team has been curating for the upcoming monograph on Charles Correa, scheduled for release later this year. If you have any information or drawings related to any of Charles Correa’s works, please reach out to us at connect@charlescorreafoundation.org.

Footnotes:

^{1, 4} ‘Charles Correa – Traditional Concepts, Astral Effects’, and ‘Profile – Charles Correa’, cover story by Chintamani Bhagat, Indian Architect & Builder, Bombay – August 1991, pg. 31-32.
² ‘Pradakshina: The Works of Charles Correa’, by Charles Correa (Special Report), Approach, Tokyo – Summer 1994, pg. 5.
³ ‘Architecture, Astronomy and the Cosmos: From Conversations to a Masterpiece’ by Ajit Kembhavi, presented at the Z-Axis Conference 2024, Mumbai — October 13, 2024. Kembhavi’s talk was instrumental in gathering anecdotal evidence of the project.