Instead, he set up his own practice in Mumbai in 1958, soon starting on the seminal Gandhi Smarak Sangahalaya (Memorial Museum) in Ahmedabad, opened in 1963 by the subcontinent's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Its small courtyards between simple, interconnected, open-sided pavilions of wood, brick and tiles followed from a crucial idea that a trail of museum rooms exhausts the visitor, so places to rest and reflect are needed, an insight gained from MIT's György Kepes.

Other early projects reveal Correa as a designer extraordinarily ahead of his time. The Hindustan Lever Pavilion (1961), built as a temporary showcase for an Indian conglomerate, was a polyhedronally faceted concrete shell informed by Buckminster Fuller domes, but with a randomness that anticipates deconstructivism by 20 years. Also naturally ventilated, the Tube House (1962), a competition-winning solution to design low-income housing for a site just 3.6m wide, may look crude with its brickwork and double cash-register form, but this was virtually the zero-energy home that we still strive for today.

The Tube House addresses the design issues of affordable urban housing and the Indian climate. The interior presents a surprising configuration of spaces on two levels. Correa went on to design other low-cost housing schemes, such as Belapur in Navi Mumbai

Correa did reel off the top buildings he'd want to be remembered for, comparing them to 'favourite children'. Even before listing the Gandhi Memorial Museum, he nominated the Kanchanjunga apartment tower, completed in 1983 in Mumbai. This 84m-high icon, indented to create verandahs for privacy and cross-ventilation and with each multilevel flat interlocking with its neighbour, it's still the most innovative skyscraper in a city whose high-rise boom has since produced towers three times as tall.

The Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya reflects the simplicity of the Indian village which informed the Mahatma Gandhi's outlook and ethos. It also offers a ritualistic pathway through its tranquil pavilions, open to courtyards and a central pool

Very different is the Jawahar Kala Kendra (1991), a multi-arts centre in Jaipur. The city was founded by the 18th-century Maharaja Jai Singh, who Correa described as 'the first modern Indian, [who was] trying to discover the past while inventing a new future'. Jai Singh built accurate sandstone astronomical observatories without optics, and based his city layout on the ancient Hindu model of the navaghara, where nine planets each occupy a box in a three-by-three grid. Correa's plan is divided like a navaghara, with one corner square whimsically displaced, and the central one a void.

The Jawahar Kala Kendra configures nine squares sections like an ancient Hindu model of the planets. Red sandstone reflects the vernacular architecture of Rajasthan

The central void is a key element of Correa's architecture, echoing the 'shunya' or nothingness at the centre of Hindu temples laid out on the divided square of the mandala. The Jawahar Kala Kendra, with its timeless warm red stone and unglazed interiors, could not be more different from contemporary museums that Correa derides as having 'reduced art to the level of religion. People don't know why it is important, but they know what to venerate: the Mona Lisa followed by Van Gogh... it's rubbish'.

Correa's next choice draws on a contemporary rather than mythical cosmos: the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (1992) in Pune. Here, the empty centre is a 'black hole' embedded in the garden, while other astronomical references include black marble and basalt representing the darkness of space, and a courtyard mapping a Sierpinski triangle to represent the universe's fractal nature. The Vidhan Bhavan (completed 1997), the Madhya Pradesh state assembly in Bhopal, is a massive complex enclosed in a 140m-diameter circle, again divided into nine compartments with an empty centre. This great citadel, dominated by its 25m-high dome referencing Buddhist stupa or tumuli, sits on Arera Hill.

One of many astrophysical metaphors in the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, this courtyard plan represents a black hole with intense radiation jets spraying from its spin axis and magnetic field lobes bulging from the equatorial plane

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