A recognition of Baker’s contribution to architecture has a singular timeliness today. His death has come at a time when a questing conscience is provoking the developing world, concerned with growth that is appropriate, to look inwards and find solutions of its own making. In such circumstances, Baker remained a lone protagonist, experimenting singly and quietly in a distant corner of the country. The causes and results of his numerous architectural interventions are now the valuable gifts he has left the profession.

Over half a century in India, marked by a deep commitment to architectural ideas and personal principles, made Baker an unfortunate misfit among his contemporaries. Sadly in his home state of Kerala much of the larger public work incorporates none of the ideas he sought to express in his own buildings. To most in the profession he was an enigma, an uncomfortable professional conscience. In death other architects will doubtless remember him in the same way as in life. Without pain or gain. But to the millions who were touched by him and his low-lying, low-cost but infinitely thoughtful brick landscapes, his passing will be mourned. And he will be remembered as much as a caring, doting architect as the only Indian architect in India.

The writer is a Delhi-based architect