Eco friendly architecture Laurie Baker - Nature House Architect - Father of Eco Friendly Architecture

Laurie Baker was a British-born Indian architect who has 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 found 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.