Poetry in Brick and Mud

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Gradually I realized that the flat roof on our rental house was not an isolated piece of insanity, but a small example of a much larger pattern. In architecture as in so much else, it seems, Indians are aspiring to an impractical Western ideal. Baker's work is both innovative and unusual in that it combines Western and traditional Indian ways. His goal has never been to leave be-hind the grand museums and concert halls by which architects are usually remembered. Rather, his passion has always been to design and build low-cost housing for the millions of Indians who, quite literally, do not have a real roof over their heads. And on a changing subcontinent whose educated classes have emigrated to Europe or North America by the millions, Baker was that great rarity: a learned Westerner who had emigrated to the Third World. I became curious to meet him.

Long before I did so, I got a taste of life in Baker buildings at Trivandrum's Centre for Development Studies, a research institute and graduate school where my wife and I were Fulbright lecturers. The 10-acre campus, stretching across a heavily wooded hillside, is Baker's masterpiece. The offices, classroom clusters, and dormitories are all brick, with few straight lines: Each structure curls in loops and waves and intersecting semicircles. The main building has a majestic entrance 30 or 40 feet wide, whose ceiling rolls out and up toward the sky and whose sides roll outward onto an even wider set of steps. Symbolic of an institution whose aim is to apply economics to helping the poor, the building has, amazingly, no front door. Anyone can walk up the steps and through the wide entrance and down the corridors at any hour of the day or night. If you want to lock your office door, that's up to you, but you can't lock the front door because there isn't one.

Not only is this campus beautiful, but Baker built it for roughly half the normal cost per square foot of Indian university buildings. And like all his buildings, these were comfortable on even the most oven-like of days. Some of the coolness was due to the breezes blowing through the jalis that fill many outside walls. A Baker jali is a brick version of traditional south Indian patterned wooden grillwork: Gaps between bricks lead air and daylight through a wall while diffusing the glare of direct sunlight. Some of the center's coolness also comes from tiny courtyards built around pools whose evaporation helps fight the heat. And coolness also comes from the shade of the many coconut palms overhead: Baker located the buildings so he would have to cut down as few trees as possible. With only one or two exceptions, such as the campus computer center, none of the offices have the Indian bureaucrat's normal status symbol--an air conditioner.

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