Laurie Baker: a British-born Indian Architect
Lawrence Wilfred โLaurieโ Baker was a British-born Indian architect. He is known for his initiatives in cost-effective energy-efficient architecture and designs. His designs are popular for maximized space, ventilation and light and maintained an uncluttered yet striking aesthetic sensibility.
He was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and his own experiences in the remote Himalayas. He promoted the use of local materials; and combined it with a design philosophy that emphasized a responsible and prudent use of resources and energy. He was a pioneer of sustainable architecture as well as organic architecture during late 1960s.
He came with the concepts like rain-water harvesting, minimum usage of energy-inefficient building materials, minimum damage to the building site and seamlessly merging with the surroundings. Due to that, he has been called the โGandhi of architectureโ.
He moved to India in 1945 as an architect associated with a leprosy mission. He lives and work in India for over 50 years. He became an Indian citizen in 1989 and resided in Thiruvananthapuram (Trivandrum), Kerala from 1969. He served as the Director of COSTFORD (Centre of Science and Technology for Rural Development), an organisation to promote low-cost housing.
In 1981, the Royal University of the Netherlands conferred an honour him for outstanding work in a Third World country. In 1983 he was conferred with an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) at Buckingham Palace.
In 1990, the Government of India awarded him the Padma Shri for his meritorious service in the field of architecture.
In 1992, he was awarded the Roll of Honour by the United Nations.ย In 1988, he was granted Indian citizenship, the only honour he actively pursued in his life.
Early life
Baker was born into a staunch Methodist family on 2nd March 1917 in Birmingham, England. He was the youngest son of Birmingham Gas Departmentโs chief accountant, Charles Frederick Baker and Millie Baker.
His early schooling was at King Edwards Grammar School. In his teens Baker began to question what religion meant to him and decided to become a Quaker, since it was closer to what he believed in.
Baker studied architecture at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, Birmingham, and graduated in 1937, aged 20, in a period of political unrest in Europe.
During the Second World War, he served in the Friends Ambulance Unit. Later, he was sent to China as a trained anaesthetist with a surgical team.
Later, he stayed with a Quaker friend, who also happened to be a good friend of the Mahatma. Baker attended many of Gandhijiโs talks and prayer-meetings. That eventually led him to a more-than-casual friendship between them. This was also the time of the Gandhi-Jinnah talks and the height of the โQuit Indiaโ movement. So though he felt the need to return to India, to settle and work here.
In 1945, he worked as an architect for the World Leprosy Mission, an international and inter-denominational organisation dedicated to the care of those suffering from leprosy. The organisation wanted a builder-architect-engineer.
Personal life:
Baker and Jacob found themselves sharing common beliefs and decided to marry. However, as there was considerable resistance from both their families, they decided to wait. Work and travel allowed them only brief periods together, and they finally got married in 1948.
For their honeymoon, they travelled to the district of Pithoragarh. Once the local tribal there found out that Elizabeth was a doctor, people came to visit the couple in droves. The couple have a son Tilak, daughters Vidya and Heidi and his grandchildren Vineet, Lisa and Tejal.
India
After moving to India in 1945, Baker began to work on leprosy centre buildings across the country. He based himself out of Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh. He quickly found the missionary lifestyle โ ostentatious bungalows, socialite gatherings and the plethora of servants waiting hand and foot. The Bakers couple lived in Pithoragarh for sixteen years before moving to Vagamon in Kerala in 1963 and some years later to Trivandrum.
Architecture
During his stay at Pithoragarh, Baker found his English construction education to be inadequate for the types of issues and materials he was faced with: termites and the yearly monsoon, as well as laterite, cow dung and mud walls, respectively. Baker had no choice but to observe and learn from the methods and practices of vernacular architecture.
He soon learned that the indigenous architecture and methods of these places were in fact the only viable means to deal with local problems.
Inspired by his discoveries, he realized that unlike the Modernist architectural movement that was gaining popularity at the time denouncing all that was old just because it was old didnโt make sense. Baker adopted local craftsmanship, traditional techniques and materials & then combined it with modern design principles and technology.
It also revived the local economy due to the use of local labour for both construction of the buildings and for manufacture of construction materials such as brick and lime surkhi.
He built several schools, chapels and hospitals in the hills. One of the early clients was Welthy Fisher, who sought to set up a โLiteracy Villageโ in which she intended to use puppetry, music and art as teaching methods to help illiterate and newly-literate adults add to their skills.
His presence would also soon be required on-site at Ms. Fisherโs โVillage,โ and he became well known for his constant presence on the construction sites of all his projects.
Architectural Style:
Throughout his practice, Baker developed a signature style in designing. He built low cost, high quality, beautiful homes, with a great portion of his work suited to or built for lower-middle to lower class clients. He derived creatively from pre-existing local culture and building traditions while keeping his designs minimal with judicious and frugal use of resources.
Another significant Baker feature is irregular, pyramid-like structures on roofs, with one side left open and tilting into the wind. His designs invariably have traditional Indian sloping roofs and terracotta Mangalore tile shingling with gables and vents allowing rising hot air to escape.
Curved walls enter Bakerโs architectural vocabulary as a means to enclose more volume at lower material cost than straight walls.
Baker made many simple suggestions for cost reduction such as the use of Rat trap bond for brick walls. He advocated the use of low energy consuming mud walls, using holes in the wall to get light, using overlaid brick over doorways, incorporating places to sit into the structure, simpler windows and a variety of roof construction approaches. He liked bare brick surfaces and considered plastering and other embellishments as superfluous.
His architectural method is one of improvisation, in which initial drawings have only an idealistic link to the final construction, with most of the accommodations and design choices being made on-site by the architect himself.
He used to make compartments for milk bottles near the doorstep, windowsills that double as bench surfaces and a heavy emphasis on taking cues from the natural condition of the site are just some examples.
This saves construction cost as well. ย Various features of his work such as using recycled material, natural environment control and frugality of design may be seen as sustainable architecture or green building with its emphasis on sustainability.
Death and legacy:
Laurie Baker died on 1 April 2007, at the age of 90. He was survived by wife Elizabeth, son Tilak, daughters Vidya and Heidi and his grandchildren Vineet, Lisa and Tejal.
Until the end he continued to work in and around his home in Trivandrum, though health concerns had kept his famous on-site physical presence to a minimum.
As a result of this more widespread acceptance, however, the โBaker Styleโ home is gaining popularity, much to Bakerโs own chagrin, since he felt that the โstyleโ being commoditised is merely the inevitable manifestation of the cultural and economic imperatives of the region in which he worked, not a solution that could be applied whole-cloth to any outside situation.
Laurie Bakerโs architecture focused on retaining a siteโs natural character and economically minded indigenous construction, and the seamless integration of local culture that has been very inspirational.
Many architects studied and were inspired by the work of Laurie Baker. The workers and students called him โdaddyโ. Laurie Bakerโs writings were published and are available through COSTFORD (the Center of Science and Technology For Rural Development), the voluntary organisation where he was Master Architect and carried out many of his later projects.
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