Correa trained at Michigan and MIT and came back to Bombay in 1958 with a question that occupied him for the rest of his life: what does a warm climate do to a plan? His answer was the open-to-sky space — terrace, courtyard, stepped section — treated as a room rather than a leftover, and he pursued it from the Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya at Ahmedabad to the Kanchanjunga Apartments and the Jawahar Kala Kendra. He was equally an urbanist: chief architect of New Bombay from 1970, chair of the National Commission on Urbanisation, and a lifelong writer on how cities fail the poor. Late work took the Vedic mandala not as decoration but as a plan-generating diagram. He received the Royal Gold Medal in 1984 and the Praemium Imperiale in 1994.
