Over the next 50 years, Baker designed and built thousands of homes, each bearing his unmistakable signature, and each built mostly with material available locally and blending with the local environment and ambience. All were shorn of ostentatious or alien elements, but were extremely functional aesthetic delights as well. He built them for everyone, from porters to leaders and bureaucrats, destitutes to billionaires, in ones and twos and in hundreds and more.

“To my mind, a home should be a smooth extension of the land it is on, it shouldn’t stick out. I made my own like a blanket hugging this hillock”, he had once said, waving at his Thiruvanantapuram home that doesn’t alter the steep landscape on which it sits, even notionally.

In Kerala, his brand of homemaking reoriented the Malayali back towards what he had strayed away from, weaning him away from a flush of NRI remittances translating into garish concrete monstrosities.

He taught Kerala how homes could be built at a fraction of the cost that they usually spent, without interfering with nature, environment, traditions and comforts.

Down the years, COSTFORD, an organization manned and run by Baker’s disciples in Kerala, have been furthering the reach of his ideas all over the country — for everything, from rebuilding villages destroyed in calamities in some part of the country to building huge architectural showpieces elsewhere.

Governments all over had vied to have him on various housing and architecture committees, ranging from the Planning Commission, HUDCO, NID, CBRI and a host of other national bodies.

... contd.