Poetry in Brick and Mud

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A droll, unassuming man with a gray beard, Baker has the manner of an avuncular, absent-minded professor who has left something behind on the way to class. His conversation rambles as if he hadn't a care in the world, and he wears no watch or socks--although no one with any sense wears socks in steamy south India. His voice is hearty, and he speaks slowly, always in complete sentences. He is still working at age 83.

Baker grew up and studied architecture in the British mill town of Birmingham. A Quaker conscientious objector, he joined an ambulance unit at the start of World War II, then spent most of the war as a health care worker in China. On the way home, he was stranded for several months in Bombay, where, through Quaker friends, he got to know Mohandas Gandhi.

Gandhi, it turned out, had a great interest in architecture. 'He said, 'Please don't take any notice of this terrible stuff around us'--the four-, five-, and six-story buildings going up,' Baker recalls. Gandhi sent Baker to see what he termed the 'concrete slums'--the tenements for Bombay's workers--and asked him, 'What is the alternative? What can we do about it?'

Deeply inspired, Baker went home, then promptly came back to India and began to build treatment centers for lepers. He married an Indian woman, a doctor. Until 1962, the couple worked in a remote Himalayan region; then they moved south to his wife's native state of Kerala.

It was in the Himalayan foothills that Baker first saw how traditional Indian architecture reflects thousands of years of trial-and-error research in energy efficiency. 'The rock they quarried for building the foundation and basement walls was split or blasted out from the same bedrock on which they would build,' he has written, noting that timber 'was always found within a few hundred yards, or at most a mile or two, of the house being constructed.' Seeing this reminded him of what Baker said was Gandhi's belief that buildings should be made of materials found within a five-mile radius.

Baker has not always been able to follow this principle, but he has come close. He is profoundly hostile to glass and steel; making them requires large amounts of expensive imported fossil fuel, and in Kerala the steel has to come from other parts of India. He regards plaster as a costly prestige item that covers up handsome walls of bricks made from local clay.

Bricks he loves. He often lays them with his own hands. For him this is not a matter of Gandhian self-humbling, but of sensual pleasure: 'Designing a house and getting someone else to build it is like preparing a menu with great care and then leaving it to someone to do the cooking and then the eating,' he says. 'It's no fun.'

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