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 ...
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
·
http://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/art-and-culture/the-houses-laurie-built-2903434/
[Indian Express – 11July2016]
·
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Baker
