A Place in the Sun | Note #8, Praani
Charles Correa’s work is an insistence that we are never alone in a space.
Praani ki Kahani
Praani is a note by Agami on listening better to the voice of nature, ways of amplifying them, and finding pathways to bring them into our ways of governance. At Agami, we are deeply interested in how rivers, forests, animals, and even the winds and the stones, might speak into our deliberations on justice.
[This Note had originally gone out on September 13th, 2025]
Offering For the Week
A Place in the Sun
Last week I got lost in the Charles Correa Foundation Archives in Panjim. Correa’s notes and essays on architecture read like first principles for living. He wrote very little about buildings and far more about relations. Calling them “non-buildings”, he saw architecture as an energy field one moves through, a system in dialogue with weather. Pathways that echo ritual journeys to a sacred centre. Courtyards open-to-sky (his Shunya principle). “There is nothing so profoundly moving,” he wrote, “as stepping out into that open-to-sky space and feeling the great arch of the sky above.”
“To live in the Third World is to respond to climate. Form follows climate,” refusing the fantasy of glass towers under a tropical sun. His Tube House, the shaded parasol roof, the split summer–winter sections all begin from climate as constraint and teacher. Each layer is ecological as much as social - roots cracking stone, wells pulling from aquifers, maidans alive with birds and rain.
‘...To walk on a seashore in the evening, or to cross a desert and arrive at a house around a courtyard, is a human experience beyond the merely photogenic. At these moments, responses are triggered off in our minds, responses conditioned by thousands of generations of life on this planet. Perhaps they are the half-forgotten memories of a primordial landscape, of a lost paradise…” - from his essay ‘A Place in the Sun.’
When the government asked him for a plan for Goa, Correa’s first recommendation wasn’t about buildings, but public transport: “To put back a network… that will provide Goa with the interaction and synergy the economy requires.” Architecture as relation not just between humans, but across species, climates, and the systems that hold us all.
Correa’s work is an insistence that we are never alone in a space. The courtyard is already sky, the doorstep is already neighbour, the maidan is already rain. The offering, then, is thinking in knots with the courtyard, breeze and corridor braided into material and affective ties.
Sparks from the Ground
Courts of the Living is an India-rooted narrative practice that traces our entanglements with other-than-human lives, listens for the wisdom our ecologies hold, and asks what it would take to stitch it into justice.
In Indonesia’s Leuser, some forest communities greet the tiger as nenek - grandmother - an elder in the family line, binding kin across species. HAkA has worked with these communities to press hard cases in human courts too, including a palm-oil company fined $26 million for burning peatlands in the last rainforest where elephants, tigers, orangutans, and rhinos still roam. In Episode 3, Irham Yunardi of HAkA traces both the wins and the knots.