Laurie Baker was a British-born Indian architect who changed the landscape in many Indian cities with buildings without plastered
walls, brick windows and sloping tiled roofs. He built Eco-friendly, low-cost,
low-energy and aesthetic houses for people’s real needs. His influence has
grown to such a level that today it is fashionable to build ‘Baker style’
houses everywhere.
Laurence Wilfred Baker was born into a Quaker family in
Birmingham on March 2, 1917. He was educated at King Edward’s Grammar School.
He learnt frugality and understood the value of money early
in life. As a child, he would spend his pocket money buying biscuits from the
local bakery. He soon discovered that for the same money, he could buy double
the amount of broken biscuits. And the broken biscuits tasted just as good!
This lesson, he never forgot.
He grew up and studied architecture in the small town of
Birmingham. He joined an ambulance unit at the start of the World War II. He
spent most of the war as a healthcare worker in China.
On the way home, he was stranded for several months in Bombay
where he had a chance to meet Mahatma Gandhi and was quizzed by Baker’s hand-made
cloth sandals. Gandhi convinced Baker that his skills and expertise were
desperately needed in India.
Deeply inspired by Gandhi, Baker returned to India a few
months later and began building treatment centres for leprosy patients. In
1948, he married Dr. Elizabeth Jacob – a medical doctor from the Christian
medical college, Vellore.
The couple then moved
to a remote village in the hills of Pithoragarh in utter Pradesh and ran a
hospital where Elizabeth was the only doctor and Baker was the rest of the
hospital staff.
Laurie Baker started practising as a full-time architect only
at the age of fifty! Baker was an expert builder – an adept mason, a skilled
carpenter. His projects were executed not by engineers but by teams of
craftsmen he had himself trained. He never hired an office or an assistant but
did all the work by himself.
It was in the Himalayas that Baker saw how traditional Indian
architecture reflected thousands of years of trial-and-error research in energy
efficiency. People used local stone and timber found within a few hundred yards
of their houses. Seeing this reminded Baker of one of Gandhi’s beliefs all
buildings should be made of materials within 5 miles of the construction
site.
Another significant Baker feature is irregular, pyramid-like
structures on roofs, with one side left open and tilting into the wind.
Baker’s designs invariably have traditional Indian sloping
roofs and terracotta Mangalore tile shingled with gables and vents allowing
rising hot air to escape.
Recycling came naturally to Baker. His bathrooms, for
example, used bits and pieces of waste glass as tiles. He embedded several
hundred broken roof tiles every foot or two in his building’s concrete roof, a
signature Baker technique.
Baker built many famous buildings that have become landmarks
and some of them are the Centre for Development Studies Literacy Village, Salim Ali Center for Ornithology and Natural History, Chitralekha Film Studio, the Indian
coffee house, Attapadi Hill Area Development Society, Dakshina Chitra, chengalchoola
slum dwelling units, Nirmithi Kendra, tourist centre, Mitraniketan.
Laurie Baker was not just an architect. He embraced life to
the fullest and on various occasions became an anaesthetist, missionary,
gardener, cook, farmer, veterinarian, ambulance driver, carpenter, mason, poet
cartoonist etc.
Laurie Baker was a recipient of many awards like D.Litt.
conferred by the Royal University of Netherlands for his outstanding work in developing countries, order of the British Empire, MBE, the first Indian national
Habitat award, Padma Sri and great master architect of the year.
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Environment