Building Bloke

Baker, as everyone knows, did return to India, where he became a pioneer of low-cost housing, using traditional material as much as possible. Baker8217;s buildings and the architectural principles that he developed are famous and well documented, but his life outside architecture and the man behind the architect are still not so well known. This deficiency has now been remedied with this small gem by Baker8217;s wife Elizabeth. She is a considerable person in her own right. Born in Kerala, she became a doctor, an achievement for a woman at that time, served all over India, and retired from work only a few years ago. Ostensibly a memoir of Baker, it is actually a biographical collage, weaving in his wonderfully vivid letters and autobiographical writings, with Elizabeth8217;s recollections.

Born in Birmingham in 1917, Baker became an architect in 1938, just before the outbreak of World War II. A devout Methodist, he gradually turned toward the pacifistic Religious Society of Friends, better known as Quakers. This decision shaped his life. He joined the Friends8217; Ambulance Unit, run by the Quakers, and served in London, tending to the wounded. The unit went to China and Burma. As the allied forces fell back in Burma before the Japanese, Baker joined the refugees steaming back. His account of the retreat is heartrending and the Burma experiences confirmed his pacifism: 8220;The Burma episode convinced me as never before that war couldn8217;t be anything but wicked and evil.8221; In China, Baker helped out at a leper home in Salachi, before being forced by illness to return to England.

Baker came to India as an architect for the Mission To Lepers, which had homes all over India. He went around on a bicycle wherever possible, but strangely, never learnt any Indian language, and was usually addressed as Daddyji! Baker and Elizabeth met at the Faizabad leper home, and waited out family opposition before marrying. They lived in a small village, Chandag, near Almora, for 16 years before starting a rural hospital in Tamil Nadu, and finally settling down in Kerala.

Baker had come to India originally as an architect trained in the modern way. However, while designing buildings, he keenly observed how people built their houses in traditional ways and realised that such buildings could be made at a fraction of the cost of the steel-and-mortar behemoths. What did Gandhi say to Baker that proved to him that he was in the right direction? Baker wrote: 8220;One of the things Gandhi said that impressed me and has influenced my thinking more than anything else was that the ideal houses in the ideal village will be built of materials which are found within a five-mile radius of the house. What clearer explanation is there of what appropriate building technology means than this advice by Gandhiji?8221; It is therefore, easy to say that the architecture of Laurie Baker was Gandhian in intent and practice.

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