Building, the Baker Way

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.

The delightful book is divided into three parts- a commentary on Laurie Baker’s architecture by renowned architect Gautam Bhatia, details of forty select buildings from thousands of Baker’s architectural creations and Baker’s own inimitable writings and speeches, most of which are unpublished. Baker’s writing lucidly brings out his ethos, his methods and vision for housing in India. There is a list of appendices which present Baker’s cost-cutting manual and guidelines to cost effective building strategies. For an architect- academic, a more formal presentation of Baker’s work, authentic photographs, plan layouts and academic referencing would have been of help. But for the lay reader who enjoys architecture, this book is a great introduction to an iconoclastic architect who gave India a lot to cherish for.