Poetry in Brick and Mud

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Sometimes Baker doesn't bother about blueprints--he prefers informal sketches and talking with construction workers on the spot--and so I ask if I can see a home he is now building. The house is for a government official and his wife, a poet. Appropriately, it is the poet with whom Baker is mainly dealing. She is, he says happily, his first client who is as eccentric as he.

'I'm noted for using old colored bottles set in cement--they give a nice light,' Baker says. 'In the drawing room, about half the main wall is going to be made of bottles only. And then we've got some holes in the roof to let sunlight in and air out.' To illustrate, Baker seizes a piece of chalk from a pouch slung over his shoulder and uses the brick wall of the house as a crude blackboard: He shows how each roof hole will have a raised rim of bottles. The rim will support a concrete cap like those that cover chimneys. And, he adds gleefully, these round skylight-vents will also function as sundials. The house itself is a spiral. A rising ribbon of smaller rooms, interspersed with a few desk-sized nooks for writing poetry, curls around a central living room, whose ceiling is two stories high.

A spiral home with poetry-writing nooks is not likely to be reproduced en masse as housing for India's poor, as Baker himself would be the first to admit. But even here, at his zaniest, he has built a house that costs vastly less than one of the same square footage designed by a conventional architect.

As any high school geometry student knows, a circle is the shortest line that will contain a given amount of space. The outer wall of a rectangular house would use far more brick.

And the fact that most of the inside walls are also curved means that some can be built with just a single thickness of brick, instead of the double thickness that straight brick walls of equal length would require for stability.

Finally, Baker is using a remarkable variety of recycled materials--and not just the several hundred glass bottles. In the bathrooms, bits and pieces of waste glass are put to work as tiles: 'If you want a piece of glass to fit a window, you go to the glass place and they cut your size, and there are always these little strips left that they throw under the table,' he explains. 'So I said, 'Can I have some?'' Several hundred chipped or broken roofing tiles are embedded every foot or two in this building's concrete roof, a signature Baker technique. As you look up at it, the inside of the roof looks like a checkerboard whose squares have been battered and then flown apart. These otherwise wasted tiles add so much reinforcement that Baker can use 30 percent less concrete in the roof.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print