Poetry in Brick and Mud

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Mortar for bricks normally would require cement--another Baker enemy, because until recently most cement in Kerala had to be imported. Baker instead likes to use substitutes such as lime. When he was building the Centre for Development Studies, for instance, he made lime on the spot. He sent people to gather cartloads of seashells on beaches a few miles away, then had them baked in a mud kiln (its fan powered by someone pedaling a stationary bicycle) and ground up. Few of the scholars from India and abroad realize that their office walls are held up partly by clamshells.

Nor do they know that they're walking on bamboo. Concrete floors and steps are ordinarily reinforced with steel rods, but Baker has found that a grid of split local bamboo, carefully lashed together in the right pattern, does the job just as well--and at less than 5 percent of the cost.

Baker would like to work more with that great renewable material--wood--but the deforestation of India has made this impossible. He would love to see Kerala's devastated forests replanted with a traditional building wood, the jack tree--'a very beautiful wood, a nice rich amber color.' It would be so easy, he muses, to plant groves of jack trees: 'They could do it with picnics for the foresters' children! Give them each a jackfruit and have them go wandering spitting out pips.'

Indian policy makers 'haven't the faith in their own materials,' Baker says. His favorite building material uses no fuel to produce, is usually only a few steps away, and is free: mud. To those who laugh, he points out that if you count all structures from village houses to Bombay office towers, 58 percent of all buildings in India are built of mud, and a good number of them are more than a hundred years old. Mud is also completely reusable. You can tear down your old house, add water, and make a new one. Try that with glass and steel.

Most Indians' picture of ideal housing is what they see from America or Europe on television. This means, Baker says, that few middle-class clients share his enthusiasm for mud: 'I say, 'Have you thought of using mud? It would save you a lot of money.' And they say, 'Well . . . no, you don't know our rain, Mr. Baker!' ' As a result, he has most often been able to design mud buildings as housing for the poor. Baker's designs have been used for tens of thousands of such units in Kerala. A family sleeping under a tarpaulin or under nothing at all doesn't worry if its first real house doesn't look like one in the San Fernando Valley.

Laurie Baker has not turned his back on the modern world; the homes and offices he has built have running water, electricity, and sometimes garages. But in his embrace of brick, mud, and bamboo, Baker has done what tragically few people in any field in the developing world have done, which is to be intelligently selective about what they take from the West.

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