Laurie Baker birth centenary: Craftsman who built liveable, lovable homes
The curious story of the Englishman who came to settle in India and built his famous low-cost brick buildings all over.
Thiruvananthapuram: A long time ago, in Thiruvananthapuram, lived a young woman who wished to spend her life alone in a house of her own. She went to an Englishman with her wish. Laurie Baker had by then made Thiruvananthapuram his home. He built for her, a house with a conical roof and his trademark brick walls. She came to him again a few years later. A man had come into her life and they wanted to live together and have their own space. Baker built a second identical house next to hers. And then built a small bridge in between to connect the two. She had her space, and he had his. When they wanted to be together, they left the doors open across the bridge. This was an architect who had always been sensitive to personal needs.
Architect G. Shankar, who narrates this story, fondly recalls another where a man called Namboothiri had argued with Baker about the number of rooms to be built in his house. Baker wanted fewer rooms for he believed Namboothiri’s children would all fly away when they grew up. Namboothiri didn’t listen and Baker’s predication came true. A tired old woman was all that was left in the house when Shankar last visited it. If alive, Laurie Baker, the architect that Kerala is so fond of, would have turned 100 years old. In the last leg of his life that he was here, Baker built over 1,000 houses in Thiruvananthapuram. Apart from the much-cherished CDS, the Indian Coffee House at Thampanoor, and part of the Chengalchoola slum dwelling units.
British-born Baker had come to India in 1945 as an architect to work with an organisation dealing with leprosy patients. During one of these leprosy missions in Uttar Pradesh, he met a woman, sister of his host Chandy with whom he stayed. Dr. Elizabeth Jacob was then working for the same cause in Hyderabad. They decided to get married, but had to wait for a little while, with opposition coming from friends and family to such a marriage. Finally in 1948, they both left their jobs at the mission and got married. Baker and Elizabeth then moved to a place called Pithoragarh in the Himalayas and lived there for 16 years. It was in Pithoragarh, watching the mountain tribesmen create buildings with local materials that would cope with local climatic conditions, that Baker understood the importance of vernacular architecture.
With materials like rock, mud and cow dung he built his houses, discarding the conventional techniques he picked up at the Birmingham School of Architecture back in England. Baker became an authority on cost-effective and energy-efficient architecture, on intermediate technology. In 1963, they moved again, to another hill area in central Kerala. To a place called Vagamon. Elizabeth began her work at a hospital there. Nalini Naik, who met them there in the 60s, remembers Baker building the hospital like a home. “Families would come there from faraway, stay and cook their food,” she says.
She also remembers Baker’s own house in Vagamon with its wonderful library around a fireplace and the huge windows in every room from where you could see the hills of Vagamon. When it was time to build her own house in Thiruvananthapuram, she asked Baker to build her room like his Vagamon room, with the bed in the window. “By the time I bought the plot Baker was not well and I had not even told him about it. But he told me ‘I heard a young woman has bought herself a piece of land’. I asked ‘Who told you’ and he said ‘The birds told me’. He was a big teaser.”
She had very little money at the time. “I told him I had only Rs 75,000 and he said he will build a palace with it.” Baker kept his word. He built her a round house with three bedrooms, one on top of the other, like a tower. For she wanted some privacy. And because she could not afford wood, he gave her built-in furniture that stuck to the walls. He built her lintels so there’d be no electric wires running on her walls, they were all outside.
The words ‘low-cost buildings’ and ‘space utilisation’ would come out of everyone for whom Laurie Baker had ever built a home. Col John Jacob, who had bought himself a plot more than four decades ago, didn’t have the money to build a house on it, back in 1986. He adored Baker’s houses but knew that you needed someone’s recommendation to approach him. He didn’t know anyone who could recommend him.
So he met Baker one day on the road, outside a house he was building. “He told me you are the first person to approach me without a recommendation and I told him I had no one for that. He said he will build a house for me.” Col Jacob had at the time Rs 2,500 in his hand. Baker laid the foundation and began work with it next week. For what could have been well over Rs 10 L, Baker gave a house of Rs 2.5 L.
When the Colonel asked for Baker’s own fees, he replied, “Four papers, an eraser and two pencils. That will be five rupees and fifty paisa.” An Englishman who came to India, converting old refugee centres into hospitals, Baker stayed on for decades and became an Indian citizen. Together with Elizabeth, he brought up three children – Tilak, Vidya and Heidi. But despite his Indianness in architecture and influence of Mahatma Gandhi with whom he had a chance encounter once, Baker never spoke in Malayalam. He communicated to local masons through his drawings. “He was a brilliant artist and a perfectionist in his drawings,” says Nalini Naik, who set up SEWA in Thiruvananthapuram. “The women’s centre he built for us is a beauty. All the roofs are of different shapes and walls of different heights. Baker never chipped off a brick.”
Among the first Baker buildings in Thiruvananthapuram is the Centre for Development Studies in Akkulam. “The then chief minister of Kerala, C. Achutha Menon, had commissioned Laurie Baker for the work. And for the budget that the PWD said they couldn’t finish the building, Baker not only completed the work but had enough left to also add a library,” says Shailaja Nair who, along with her husband Sajan, had closely worked with Baker during the initial days of setting up COSTFORD, a voluntary organisation for cost-effective architecture, in the capital.
She was so close to Baker she used to call him Daddy, and Elizabeth, Mummy. Baker’s sense of humor again comes to light as Shailaja narrates her chats with him. She had once complained to Baker at such lengths about Sajan talking very little that Baker said in the end “Somebody has to keep quiet.” Another time when Elizabeth introduced Sajan to someone as the ‘right hand of Baker’, he whispered, ‘I am a lefthander’. Baker was also known as a one-man architect. He did all the work himself, with the help of masons. There were never any engineers around him. He would measure with his footsteps, as Shailaja words it. He laid the first brick himself and the masons followed him. He also stayed true to his simple Gandhian ways.
Col Jacob shows a letter Baker had written him at a time he was not well. “He was against nokukooli (unofficial labour norm in Kerala) and was once beaten up badly by some miscreants because of this. He was hospitalised and lost a lot of blood. But when I visited him, he, in his humorous ways, said ‘Jacob I am pure Indian now. I drained out all my English blood and now have Indian blood’.” His sense of humour was an integral part of him, says Tilak Baker. He would convert any difficulty into something light. Tilak remembers a hospital series of cartoons that his father once came home with. “He was hospitalised with some intestinal problems. One of these cartoons is about a nurse waking him up to tell him it is time for his sleeping pills,” Tilak says.
Baker had always made sure he spent time with his family, that at least once a day they’d all sit together for meals. He never lectured his children but they’d still learn from him. “It was like osmosis. He never told us what to do. My sister Vidya, while she was doing her BA in Literature, was into fashion designing. Dad would sit and design with her. She thought of dropping out of college and dad never said anything, but eventually she decided not to. Through his ways of life, his way of talking, he passes on these values. And I believe his simplicity has rubbed off on all three of us.”
The author is publication officer at Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram