On March 2nd, 1917, a child was born in England whose life would challenge everything we think we know about architecture and its role in society—Laurie Baker.
Mr. Baker arrived in India in 1845, just two years before independence, as an architect associated with a leprosy mission, and continued to live and work in India for over 50 years. What makes his story extraordinary is not just what he built, but how he redefined what it means to be an architect in a developing nation struggling with poverty, environmental degradation, and cultural alienation.
“I have little hesitation in saying that the ’80s and the ’90s generation of architects of Kerala—and, to some extent, India – were singularly fortunate in having a Guru in Mr. Laurie Baker, if I am allowed to use that much abused and maligned phrase in a case where it is the most appropriate. In a manner of speaking, Mr. Baker is to the local architecture what Mahatma Gandhi was to India’s freedom struggle. Both led to liberation, both believed in simplicity, both drew their strategies from the culture and tradition of the place, both had a vision of the society they served, and both had implicit faith in the common people and their wisdom.
Mr. Baker is a true leader in the field, which has hardly produced a leader of merit. His contribution and inspiration are not in the form of technology or style alone. It is in the form of a change of mindset, in the philosophy of work, and in the attitude to architectural design, practice and problem solving. He made architecture belong to the place– to the soil, to culture, to tradition and, most importantly, to the local people. And that is no small contribution in a country where architecture, in the hands of the foreign-trained and influenced architects, is losing its roots, and where alienation—alienation from the people, from the roots, tradition, culture, climate and soil – is the order of the day. And, in a way, it is a paradox, as Mr. Baker was a foreigner.
Perhaps most revolutionary was Mr. Baker’s belief that architects could learn from artisans, masons, and carpenters.
Working alongside traditional construction artisans, especially the masons, he improved and popularised technologies like rattrap bond or filler slab, which saved material, reduced cost, and created new aesthetics. His architecture merged with the surrounding landscape rather than standing out. It is not in competition with nature but in harmony with it. He challenged conventional engineering design, practice, and wisdom by using 9″ and 4.5″ thick brick walls as load-bearing structures for buildings taller than a single story. He was a pioneer of sustainable architecture as well as organic architecture, incorporating in his designs, even in the late 1960s, concepts such as rainwater harvesting, minimising the usage of energy-inefficient building materials, minimising damage to the building site, and seamlessly merging with the surroundings.
Due to his social and humanitarian efforts to bring architecture and design to the common man, his honest use of materials, his belief in simplicity in design and life, and his staunch Quaker conviction in non-violence. It was a reimagining of the relationship between formal architectural education and traditional building knowledge. The most lasting contribution of Mr. Baker is his attitude toward architectural design and practice. He sought to simplify and demystify it.
Each generation produces Masters and a legion of their followers. So has Mr. Laurie Baker, though I think he would not like the tag of a ‘Master.’ His humility, attitude, and his brand of professionalism wouldn’t make him comfortable with that kind of title. His followers, however, are unlike the other followers of the ‘Great Masters,’ both foreign and local. They don’t imitate style; they imbibe spirit—’spiritual’ following and the following in ‘spirit’. Organisations like COSTFORD or Habitat Technology Group, or Laurie Baker Centre for Habitat Studies continue his work not as copyists but as spiritual torchbearers. They carry forward his message of service and innovation. They are more than ‘alternative’ practitioners. They are leading a silent yet most relevant movement.
Their work has gained international recognition, from earthquake reconstruction in Gujarat to campus construction in Bangladesh, proving that Baker’s principles have universal relevance while remaining deeply rooted in local contexts.
Baker’s choice of Kerala as his home and workplace was perhaps not accidental. Ideas grow there, take root, spread, and prosper. Kerala’s receptive culture and creative people provided the ideal soil for Baker’s innovations to thrive. Yet his relevance extends far beyond Kerala’s borders, becoming more urgent with each passing year as India faces multiple architectural and urban crises. We are headed toward a chaotic uncertainty, if not an inevitable crisis, so far as shaping the built environment in our cities and villages is concerned, and there is much that is relevant in what Mr. Baker thought, did, and showed.
Let’s consider the rural housing programmes like Indira Awas Yojana, which despite a staggering achievement in terms of numbers (around 30 million houses now), longevity of the scheme (some 30 years), wide coverage (entire country), and massive cumulative investment (in the region of Rs. 70-80,000 crore), the quality aspect of houses built under IAY has suffered constantly and consistently.
It is one of the poorly designed, poorly constructed, poorly monitored, and poorly managed programs of half-completed houses. While the program is well-intentioned and even well-conceived, it is a colossal waste of resources. The programme works even today, where every year 2 million new houses are constructed under this program at an investment of about Rs. 15-16,000 crore. If you add the state public housing programs, nearly 3 million houses get built every year at an investment of Rs. 25,000 crores for the rural poor on a subsidised basis.
Programmes like IAY are an attempt not only at housing provision but also at social inclusion. It is ensuring citizenship and giving dignity, and is an attempt at empowerment of the marginalised.
But how many architects, architecture and engineering colleges know of its existence, purpose, scale, and problems?
How many have attempted to do something about its failures?
How many have approached the government at any level with ideas for improvement?
How many architects have opted to work on this during their internships?
Have the well-organised associations of architects or planners said anything on this massive program in the past 30 years?
Is housing supposed to be a business?
The silence of the architectural professionals on such a massive public programme raises questions about who architects actually serve.
We, as architects, should be concerned that such a massive and long-lasting public housing program has contributed little to building and strengthening the rural housing delivery system, has nothing to show for short- or long-term employment creation, and has contributed little in terms of rural habitat policy making and institutional development. The government is aware of the shortcomings and keen on improving the performance of the program; the concerned architects, schools of architecture, their faculties, and students can play multiple roles in making a difference.
Urban India presents an equally grim picture. If the villages are the places where architects do not live and work, they are certainly in the cities. And if the cities are the performing theatre for the architects, what is the shape and condition of the cities? What contribution are the architects making to making them better places to live, work, grow, and progress?
If Mumbai, the financial capital, has half its people living in slums, if Delhi’s air is so polluted that the High Court describes it as a ‘gas chamber’, and if the Ganges river is so contaminated that it requires a special ministry and cleaning mission, what hope do smaller cities have?
Decades ago, in a seminar on Design for Development at NID, Ahmedabad, Ramesh Thapar, a public intellectual, asked a question on the role of the designer: “What does a designer do with the waves of vulgarity invading our cities? Is their work putting up one well-designed structure among a hundred ugly ones, or to work toward sensitisation against the invading ugliness?”
The complete breakdown of urban form and function, the environmental catastrophe unfolding in plain sight, all of this demands an architectural response that goes far beyond designing individual buildings for wealthy clients. It is not enough to say we are making our buildings good.
The problem runs deeper than practice, extending into architectural education itself. Indian architectural education still carries the hangover of colonial mindsets that reject and look down upon local, indigenous knowledge. Students learn to look westward for ideas, inspiration, examples, and masters, remaining disconnected from contemporary societal challenges.
Is the architecture education in the country removed/divorced/disconnected from the contemporary societal and even sectoral challenges?
Isn’t our education and practice under the influence of the past? How much has really changed?
How much has the indigenisation been?
The foreign tag still carries premium, and the foreign-trained architect still calls the shots.
Has that weight lessened?
Has the mindset, mentality changed?
How much is local and indigenous in our architectural and planning education?
Isn’t it true that most practising architects understand little—and care even less—for the external environmental factors such as climate, energy, water, etc., while designing buildings? They remain victims of external, mostly Western influences, practitioners of unsuited and inappropriate styles. A full glass façade in India’s blazing sun, necessitating energy-intensive air conditioning systems, represents not just poor design but an insult to local climate and the global energy crisis. Cost consciousness is looked down upon as the preoccupation of inferior architects when it should be understood as an essential responsibility.
In some ways, aren’t the architects alien in their own environment, in their own place and understanding and responding to the demands of climate, energy crisis, resource crunch, social complexities, and lifestyle choices? Aren’t they divorced from the rich local traditional practices in building construction? Don’t the architects’ stylistic preferences, their ‘isms,’ override the functional needs of their clients?
Put crudely—and the fellow architects may kindly excuse my saying this—aren’t the architects taking their clients for a ride? —partly through ignorance, partly through arrogance, partly through alienation, partly through design, and partly through default?
Architects are concentrated mainly in big cities, serving primarily the rich, businessmen, industrialists, and institutional builders, essentially the upper one or two per cent of society. What about the other 98 per cent? Don’t they build and invest? Don’t they need architectural services? Wouldn’t professional expertise make a difference to what they build using their own resources or para-professionals?
Even within their own operative environment, architects do little to change the highly restrictive and constraining regulatory framework that seems designed to kill creativity and innovation. Building bylaws and regulations remain deliberately vague, interpretations vary arbitrarily, corruption is rampant, yet the architectural community shows remarkable subservience to this system’s irrationality and tyranny. The profession that should be most qualified to advocate for supportive, enabling regulations that could make cities beautiful, and their skylines exciting, remains largely silent.
The ethical dimensions are troubling as well. Architects often visit their projects/work sites. How many visit labour camps on the site to inquire about water quality and safety precautions for workers on higher floors, let alone whether there is a crèche for their children? Unlike paintings that adorn walls, buildings last a hundred years, stand prominently in streets, and must remain relevant across generations. “From the doorknob to the city square” is an architect’s universe. How many share that vision, perspective, and responsibility?
The profession’s leadership needs to be looked into. Systemic deficiencies and institutional change demand a committed leadership with a vision. What kind of leadership does the profession have? Who are the leaders, and what are they doing? Which issues are championed? What remedies, options, and strategies are suggested?
This critique doesn’t emerge from negativity or frustration but from a belief that architects, as a community of privileged professionals, could contribute so much more meaningfully to society.
I believe that architecture as a subject, as an art form, as a science, as a Shashtra, is too big and ancient to be treated with anything but respect and pride. But the architecture profession, as perceived and practised now, certainly needs a rethink, a paradigm shift. The multiple crises that include energy, water, space, resources, ecology, governance, values, etc.—the new technologies, changing social equations and emerging realities in the globalising cities make it imperative that the architects re-educate and re-equip themselves. Both de-learning and re-learning are called for. Moreover, a degree of de-professionalisation of the conventional professional, in terms of attitudinal shift, client choices and priorities.
Architecture is a noble profession. In the hands of its conscientious practitioners, it is a medium to serve the people and also the environment. “Service” is the word. It combines both art and science. Culture and technology are its pillars. It is a vehicle to translate ideas and dreams into reality. It embraces both reality and vision, creativity and practicality. It has been there from the dawn of civilisation and will always be there. However, the way it is perceived and practised, it needs to move from the monuments to people; from magazine pages to practical lives; from the elite to the common people; from top to bottom; from the pedestal to the ground. That would take nothing away from its hallows, its mystique and its nobility. It will only be richer.
Mr. Laurie Baker showed us that architecture could be simultaneously beautiful, affordable, and an appropriate place to live. He has left behind a body of work, a philosophy, and a way of thinking and doing. A unique legacy. Besides being a visionary, he also had a strong practical side. That practice is of huge inspiration and guidance as we work to contribute to managing our rural and urban settlements better, and taking architecture to the common people.
The centenary celebration is a useful vehicle to reach his voice, vision, philosophy, and work to the architects and others in the profession—especially the younger generation, the students learning to become architects, and those who contribute to shaping better buildings, better villages and cities, and better life for all people.
The question facing today’s architects is whether they will have the courage and commitment to follow the path Baker pioneered, or whether they will continue serving the comfortable few while the majority of India builds without their guidance, wisdom, or care.
Note: The article is based on Kirtee Shah’s keynote speech for “Laurie Baker Birth Centenary Celebrations” held on March 2, 2016, at the Institution of Engineers Hall, Thiruvananthapuram.
To read the complete keynote address, please visit here.
