Thursday, March 02, 2017

Laurie Baker - Birthday 2March

Laurence Wilfred "Laurie" Baker was a British-born Indian architect, renowned for his initiatives in cost-effective energy-efficient architecture and designs that maximized space, ventilation and light ... 
Died1 April 2007, Thiruvananthapuram

Every time R Narayanan, a senior IAS officer, stepped out for a walk with his wife Geeta, he would dread the moment they approached a red- brick house in their neighbourhood because of the way she would crane her neck for a closer look. Soon, she learned that the residence was built by Laurie Baker. A week later, the accomplished Bharatanatyam dancer met the 6’4” architect with blue eyes; he would build her a home in her image — a dark red-orange spiral brick house that twirled like a dancer.
Against the backdrop of evergreen trees and paddy fields, hills and the coast, Baker made Thiruvananthapuram his home for over four decades. His name would become synonymous with cost-effective, energy-efficient housing. But Laurence Wilfred Baker didn’t start building in Kerala until he was nearly 50.
Born in 1917, Baker was the youngest of three children. His parents, a Methodist couple in Birmingham, took their children to cathedrals and old buildings around Europe. These trips introduced him to architecture and later, he pursued the discipline at the Birmingham School of Architecture, graduating in 1938. A year later, when World War II broke out, Baker refused the call to arms, but his Quaker belief led him to join the Friends Ambulance Unit. He was posted in China, where for nearly four years, he nursed patients in a leprosy village, as their doctor and pharmacist. He was ordered to return home in 1943, and en route to England, Baker waited four months in Bombay. That was when he met Mahatma Gandhi, who noticed Baker’s handmade shoe and asked him about it. When he learnt that Baker was a trained architect, Gandhi told him that the real India lived in the villages. Baker would later narrate: “One of the things he said has influenced my thinking — that the ideal house in the ideal village will be built using material which are found within a five-mile radius of the house.”
Baker would return to England, but India was always on his mind. In 1945, a worldwide leprosy organisation in India sent out a call for architects and engineers to turn refugee centres into hospitals. And before he knew it, Baker was aboard a ship to India, to work in Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh. Unwilling to live like a sahib, he roomed with PJ Chandy, the doctor who ran the leprosy hospital. They became close friends, and Baker met his sister Elizabeth, who was also a doctor. Much against their family’s wishes, they decided to get married in 1948. The couple then trekked to the hills, in what is now Uttarakhand, for their honeymoon and stayed there for the next 16 years.
Pithoragarh would become home and hospital for the Bakers. The Himalayan town found its first doctor in Elizabeth, while Baker formed the “rest of the staff”. He built their home with stone and bamboo, and observed how locals used tree trunks as trusses and slate roofs bedded with mud.
It would take yet another war that would force Baker to move. In 1962, when the Indo-China war broke out, Pithoragarh was no longer safe to call home. A year later, the Bakers and their three children — son Tilak and daughters Vidya and Heidi — arrived in hilly Vagamon, Kerala. The remote village was inhabited by tribals and Tamil migrants. Here, Baker saw a different style of architecture based on entirely different material. Coconut palm was used for roofing, and laterite was ubiquitous as structural material. So, he built a very English stone house there, with gables, and even dug a lake.
In 1969, the family would shift again; this time to Nalanchira, Thiruvananthapuram. On an uneven plot of land, they built their first thatched house and called it The Hamlet. “Our home was always full of guests. At Christmas, Daddy did a traditional roast every year. He would make a tree with bricks and our presents were under there; handmade, all of them,” says Heidi, 49.
Baker’s first challenge began at church. The Archbishop of Trivandrum wanted to build homes for the poorest families in the parish but found no takers; inexpensive houses were considered a myth. In 1970, Baker built a 430 sq ft house within Rs 3,000. Made with exposed brick, hatted with a wooden structure and Mangalore tiles, the local engineers commented that the house was “too good for the poor”.
None of the local engineers believed that the “mason from England” could build strong structures. And yet, Baker’s playground — the Centre for Development Studies (CDS) in Thiruvananthapuram — is proof of his intuitive engineering skills. As one completes the undulating trek across the 10-acre property, one can see ramps twist around trees, dark corridors stage an afternoon dance as sunlight passes through the jaalis; a gentle wind blows across the exposed brick interiors. From the seven-storey polygon library tower, designed as a wheel, layered with his trademark latticework, to the men’s and women’s hostels that curve with the land, Baker demonstrated that local materials could be used intelligently.
If CDS was one of Baker’s first public projects, the Laurie Baker Centre for Habitat Studies (LBC) in Vilappilsala, nearly 12 km from the city, was his last. A bald hill, which was an abandoned quarry, was nurtured with seeds and saplings and LBC bought the land to take Baker’s legacy forward. “He cut out buildings in the most difficult, uneven places, freeing up even spaces,” says KP Kannan, chairman, LBC and COSTFORD (Centre of Science and Technology for Rural Development). The Hamlet too is built on rocky terrain. Built-in beds hug windows, spare cycle parts are dressed as grilles, red oxide seats emerge from the ground and coloured bottles find their way between jaalis.
Modern architects attribute beauty to external features but Baker believed beauty was in the details. “Our mind was his tool,” says KV George, an artist whose house Baker built. “Sometimes, you journey to find yourself but ever since Baker built us this house, I am more self-contained at home.”
Can beauty be spiritual? These are questions that contemporary architecture never asks. In each of Baker’s projects, the experience is multi-layered and three-dimensional. One is never simply climbing a flight of steps; en route, you can see a sliver of the sky, or a dash of the earth. You can feel the warmth of the terracotta flooring beneath your feet, or shut the whole world out in a cosy alcove. “He would insist on one finger gap between the bricks. He could work with both hands and with great speed. He would finish a line, and ask us to complete the next five lines. Today, when I look at modern buildings, I think of how can they can be aesthetically different,” says K Vijayan, a mason who worked with Baker for over three decades. Madhavan mistri, who worked with him for nearly 40 years, recalls that Baker would only charge a mason’s one-day fee when he visited the site, which was Rs 5-7, in the ’70s and ’80s.
Since Baker never learned Malayalam, Tilak would accompany his father on site visits after school, and Elizabeth kept the accounts. They addressed him as Daddy, and workers on site, too, did the same. “Daddy never worked with a plan, it always evolved on site. He communicated through drawings,” says Madhavan.
In the ’70s, housing schemes for the poor were being launched by then chief minister C Achutha Menon. In 1985, Baker joined hands with Menon, social activist Chandra Dutta, and economist KN Raj (who was also founder of CDS) to form COSTFORD, a non-profit organisation that engaged with urban and rural development. Baker’s rat-trap style of laying bricks saved nearly 25 per cent of construction costs. His other technique of using Mangalore tiles reduced costs by nearly 30 per cent. His way of minimising costs included frameless doors, which swing on pivots, jaalis instead of windows, and red or black oxide flooring instead of marble. Salvaged wood could be artistically crafted as switchboards and lamp stands. Baker avoided beams and lintels, and used corbels or arches and brick on edge to support walls. “At the time, many research institutes in Roorkee, Chennai, Bangalore and Auroville were finding ways to reduce costs. But much of their work was in concrete. Baker experimented with local materials,” says V Suresh, former chairman, HUDCO (Housing and Urban Development Corporation).
For Suresh and his author wife Neerada’s house, Baker went 60 ft high in a helical pattern, across four floors. The elevation changes from 10 ft and ascends to 20 ft in a single room. “Did you make this house to play hide-and-seek?” a child asked Neerada. The 3,600 sq ft house was constructed for Rs 325 a sq ft compared to the market rate of Rs 1,000 a sq ft in 1998. “He could be called the father of cost-effective housing; he used the same techniques in a fisherman’s house as he did in mine,” says Suresh.
Baker lived a spartan life — he never had assistants, his “office” was in his khadi pocket. Recycled pieces of envelopes and invitations would be used to explain his designs to masons. A corner of his bedroom housed his formal office, where he made his hand-drawn plans for clients — not one but usually three or four. “Daddy would engage with his clients for many days. He wanted to know everything about them and how they lived. He was also very careful about picking up cues from the site,” says PB Sajan, joint director, COSTFORD.
Many of Baker’s writings on slums, waste management and rural community buildings are manuals that show how design can be customised. “He was not only a brilliant architect, but also a cartoonist; he wrote columns on urban issues, and towards the end of his life, did a design series on mango-shaped collages,” says Sajan. Baker passed away in 2007. He was 90.
Among those who landed at Baker’s door were Goa-based architect Gerard da Cunha, who built Protima Bedi’s Nrityagram in Bangalore; Jaigopal Rao of Kochi-based firm Inspiration, who worked with Baker on his Latur earthquake relief housing; and Chennai-based Benny Kuriakose, who built Dakshinchitra, a museum of Tamil Nadu. In Delhi, Anil Laul, RD Padmakumar and Gautam Bhatia were key architects at the Laurie Baker Building Centre, RK Puram.
While Baker’s method and technology is still being practised, the scalibility of it is in question. “Baker thought of all aspects of architecture. But a lot of his work can’t be codified into practice, purely because they are labour intensive. With the rise in wages, it will prove to be more expensive to build a Baker-style house today. But his life teaches us that economics is a self-referential game, where the high demand for material reduces their price to their most economical level,” says Delhi-based architect Sanjay Prakash.
Kerala-based architect G Shankar, who advocates sustainable architecture, says, “Baker’s life and work were in sync. I have seen nobody like him before or nobody like him after.”
Sr. No.
Title
Subj. Category
Class No.
Acc. No.

1
Houses: how to reduce building cost by Laurie Baker
AR-AW
728.1
A1097 – A1099

2
Laurie Baker: Lifer work & writings
AR-AW
720.92
A0622, A0800 – A0801

Works of Laurie Baker:
  • Architect Lauri Baker (right), and his sketch depicting his version of the Taj Mahal.
  • The Indian Coffee House in Thiruvananthapuram, which was designed by Laurie Baker.
  • The S-shaped facade of the ladies hostel at the CDS. (Source: KB Jayachandran)
  • The interior of former chairman, HUDCO V Suresh’s house. (Source: KB Jayachandran)
  • Typical examples of Laurie Baker’s architectural style.

 Sources:

·         Laurie Baker : Architect's Official Website - http://lauriebaker.net/index.php

·         https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Baker