Charles Correa

The Gandhi Memorial Museum (Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya) in Ahmedabad, documented in Correa’s monograph, represents one of the clearest demonstrations of the mat typology in a climatic and cultural context analogous to Lahaina’s. The thesis describes how Correa organizes the museum as an aggregation of square modules on a 6-meter by 6-meter grid, each defined by lightweight walls, shaded verandas, and open-air transitions. The height under the channel beam is 2.1 meters, creating intimate, human-scaled spaces. The thesis adopts the 6m by 6m grid from the Gandhi Ashram as the primary dimensional module for the Lahaina Primary School.

Correa’s later works — including St. Xavier’s Primary School in Ahmedabad and Bharat Bhavan — extend the mat logic to educational and civic programs, demonstrating how classrooms, shared learning spaces, courtyards, and semi-open thresholds can be arranged as a distributed system rather than stacked vertically.