Laurie Baker, for whom home was extension of land, dies at 90

The boy from a middle class home in Birmingham who studied architecture in London, Baker came to India accidentally during the height of the Second World War, on board a British warship that he served on. The ship happened to get stuck in Mumbai while returning from China. Baker loved recounting how he used those three months in Mumbai to go around and study the city’s architecture, and then called on the man who changed his life forever — Mahatma Gandhi.

Gandhi took an amused look at the young Briton, more particularly at his homemade shoes that Baker had cleverly sewn together from discarded cloth bits and a thrown-away sole. Gandhi smiled and asked him to return to India once out of the Royal Navy, and if he could use that kind of ingenuity in architecture to help build homes for India’s poor. “That changed everything. I may have been overawed by him but he made tremendous sense,” Baker told this reporter a few years ago.

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.

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