Gautam Bhatia (1991). Laurie
Baker: Life, Works and Writing, Penguin Books, pp. 312.
I chanced into this book on
Laurie Baker, the delightful British architect who stayed a long part of his
life in India, the same way I bumped into one of his own creations- by pure
accident. A few years ago, I was eagerly stepping into the grounds of Centre
for Development Studies in Trivandrum (southern Kerala) for visiting the library
to browse through its delectable collection of books. I was spell bound by the
beautiful buildings nestled in the quiet grounds and for a change, preferred staying
outdoors to the reading hall.
Laurie Baker stayed in India,
first in Pithorogarh district in the valley of Himalayas for sixteen years and
then in Kerala. A chance encounter with Mahatma Gandhi at the height of Quit
India movement in 1942, led Baker to a maxim that true independence can come only
when self-reliance and local craftsmanship was employed in building the nation.
Gandhi’s message instantly struck a chord with young Baker since it resonated
with his intense religious faith (he was from a Quaker background) and his own professional
training. The bare simplicity of his
architecture (constructing only the essentials) and the blunt honesty of his
structures (where mud looked like mud and brick, like brick) is a veritable
reflection of his realised faith and the harmonious balance between his work
and life.
Understanding
the vernacular
One of the cardinal principles of
the Baker method of building is the appropriateness of traditional methods- using
locally available material suited to climatic conditions with locally available
skill and technology. For him, originality lay in going back to the origins,
the tried and tested method of trial and error, by which people over thousands
of years participated in an ever-going research to build enduring, meaningful,
cost effective and sustainable buildings. Most of Baker’s architecture is
uni-style, using mud, locally made tile and bricks, particularly suited to the
tropical climate of Kerala.
In his writings, Baker muses on
the centrality and the marginality of the architect. The architect is the
primary individual who has to see the problems of construction through to the
end, and not fall back upon other ‘structures men’ like the engineer or the
carpenter. From the realm of ideas and drawings to the final outcome as a tangible
structure, a building results when an architect constantly intervenes and
relentlessly controls the process. Yet, in a beautiful contradiction of roles,
Baker calls the architect an extra, the side piece, an outsider, who merely realises
another individual’s attachment to his place of dwelling, a family’s sense of
security and familiarity. This deep involvement in his craft and empathy with
his clients makes him a humanist builder.
Problems
with modern architecture
Baker is unsurprisingly a
critique of modern mass production of buildings at high cost using
unsustainable methods. At the turn of the twentieth century, when modernism was
setting in, there was a widespread belief that technology would facilitate the
arrival of facilities at affordable rates to ordinary people. This was
especially true in case of housing with rising demands and shrinking resources.
Baker argues that modern movement took a sterile turn for the worse with the
industrial economy taking design over. Humanistic considerations no longer
remained centre-stage in housing projects. The advent of cement, steel and
glass has transformed natural ways of building homes into a purely industrial
enterprise.
This break from tradition also implied
the coming of the anonymous, impersonal buildings. The need to evolve buildings
amidst severe resource constraints and the emphasis on speed tyrannised the
creative part of architecture, shifting its focus from earthy humanism to
technology. Mass production of building parts by mechanised production has
overwhelmed expenses and underperformed at the demand side, literally pushing
people to homelessness.
Baker’s method is one of the
important and sustainable answers to the housing problem in a country like
India. The simultaneous understanding of change and tradition is at the heart
of meaningful evolution of building cost-effective homes. Assembly-line approaches
cannot grapple with the idea of space, habits of tradition, possibilities of
imagination and the unarticulated specification of geographical condition. Baker
has built a vocabulary of these elements in each of the thousand buildings he
has constructed over five decades in India. His client list includes the
iconoclastic individual, the imaginative community and the bureaucratic institutions.
