On Baker street

Brick walls that go without plaster, doors and windows that let the light stream in and houses that are quake resistant. This is the legacy Laurie Baker has left in the villages of Kerala and the hills of Uttarakhand.

Architectural Gandhigiri? That8217;s what most people thought when Laurie Baker came to be noticed in the early 1960s, quietly tossing aside the pet notions on building homes and rubbishing architectural canons that were in vogue. He didn8217;t want to build palaces or grand ballrooms, he didn8217;t even want to brandish his own brand, style or methods, or use steel and concrete wherever he could help.

It was Mahatma Gandhi who had thrown a challenge at the young architect from Birmingham during World War II. This was at a chance meeting in Mumbai while Baker, enlisted to serve as an anaesthetist, was waiting for a ship to take him home. 8220;Use your ingenuity, your skills, build good, affordable roofs for this country8217;s poor,8221; Gandhi had told him.

Baker returned to do just that, and a lot more8212;and stayed on for the next four decades8212;till he died early this week. He was more Indian than many Indian architects, and not just because he was granted Indian citizenship in 1989.

Even while he worked frenetically on many projects at a time, Baker didn8217;t need an office, assistants or even draftsmen to help him. Buildings took shape in his mind and often came to life in scribbles on the backs of envelopes, even on unprinted portions of newspapers.

He built thousands of buildings them for everyone, from village slum dwellers to billionaires, destitutes to leaders. He took his craft to everything from UN advisory bodies to the Planning Commission and HUDCO. Right down to small villages in Kerala, where he rubbed shoulders with local workmen, teaching them modern construction techniques and attitudes, as they built for him.

A Baker building would typically have unplastered brick walls, jalis or trellises in the brickwork, doors and windows with no frames but which let in a lot of light and air. Each one was built using locally available material like mud, bricks, stones, terracotta tiles and even coconut thatch8212;steel and cement were used only where unavoidable. Distinctly low cost, but durable and phenomenally functional. Earthy, and almost an extension of their surroundings. Buildings that don8217;t confine, but comfort and inspire.

8220;We have no moral space to be extravagant in our country. Especially when we don8217;t need to be, to build homes we love living in,8221; Baker once said. He would constantly remind one that low cost didn8217;t mean cheap or substandard, but sensitive and sensible.

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He would also stubbornly deny there was anything called a Baker home, because everything he built was purely for those who would use it, carefully keeping everything about their lifestyle and needs in mind. And no two homes or buildings could be the same.