Poetry in Brick and Mud

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Baker emphasizes that building attractive and energy-efficient buildings doesn't depend on Western-style training. On the contrary, he says, architecture is too important to be left to architects. He has written nearly a dozen do-it-yourself booklets, with titles like Laurie Baker's Mud, illustrated with his own pen-and-ink diagrams. Some have been translated into Malayalam, the language spoken in Kerala. Two of the most recent, Rural Community Buildingsand Cost Reduction for Primary School Buildings, were published on Baker's 80th birthday.

Baker's ideas have caught the imagination of younger, environmentally minded Indian architects and engineers, and nearly 100 of them now work for a nonprofit organization that practices his approach: COSTFORD, or the Center of Science and Technology for Rural Development. In the past 15 years, COSTFORD has built homes for 10,000 poverty-level families, for which it charges no design fee. The center has also built government buildings and homes for 1,500 middle-class and professional families, which has helped pay for the other work. The organization's Trivandrum office is run by Shailaja Nair, a 34-year-old architect, and her engineer husband. A picture of 'Bakerji' hangs on the office wall. 'He's half a century older than we are,' says Nair. 'But he's one of us. How do you explain a man like that?'

Nair takes me on an all-day tour of COSTFORD projects built with Baker-inspired designs. We end up in a rural village called Koliyacode to visit five recently completed mud homes of several rooms each. Government subsidies provided the equivalent of around $400 per house, and the village residents contributed more, in some cases their own labor. Most of the money went for wood (roof beams and window and door frames) and roofing tile. The roofs overhang the walls to protect them from the monsoon rains--a sine qua non of mud architecture--and a drainage ditch below carries the water away. There is no glass in the windows, but wooden bars keep out intruders and India's vast army of crows. Except for the roof tile and the wood, everything is made of dried brown mud: inner and outer walls, and even the large mud bricks that hold up some living room shelves. The sturdy outer walls are about six inches thick. They do not crumble to the touch, and they feel as hard as concrete when I bang my fist on them.

The weather has gotten hotter than ever since I arrived in Kerala, but today, inside these buildings, it is wonderfully cool. The one place inside where it's hot--the loft area, where the sun's heat has seeped through the tile roof and hot air from inside has risen--is used to dry grain or freshly washed clothes. As I tour the houses, a flock of villagers and their children begin to gather, curious that a foreigner would come all this way to punch a wall of mud.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print