I haven't invested enough in studying Laurie Baker, until now. Perhaps his work suffers over-identification by the badge of architects who practice "sustainable architecture" today. To ask whether Baker really was practicing sustainability may be a tricky question. After all, much of his work uses local material, climatic responses and immense contextuality to their sites. Yet, his work doesn't end up like the vernacular - one sees bold experiments in form, as well as material technique. Swirling curves in brick, flowing slabs of concrete, porous walls with intricate lattice jalis - don't these convey a compulsive spirit of the modern? Often these gestures get misread as vernacular. Enthusiasts of sustainable practice consistently fail to acknowledge the formal experiments of Baker, over emphasizing upon the cost effectiveness of building technique.
Baker wrote numerous books on cost-effective construction techniques. Available to the common man easily, he often reduced for people building techniques almost like applicable formulae. This has become the primary mode in which we consume, understand and remember Baker today. While written as mere essentials of construction process, he never fell in the formulaic trap, constantly innovating and critically evolving his material conception of space. This fundamental split in the way we consume versus experience Baker's architecture has made us categorically leave out Baker in the mainstream modern architectural discourse. Further, in framing his buildings merely as "cost-effective" or "sustainable", we have foreshadowed the experiential aspects of his buildings to a large extent, reducing our focus merely to his use of material and techniques.
We are introduced to an extensive range of methods in which a set of bricks can be put together in moving through Baker's buildings. The manner in which surfacial textures are created merely by a variation in the way brick is twisted/moved and re-placed over one another opens up worlds of experiences (ref: The Smooth and the Striated, Gilles Deleuze). In structure and skin, the brick forever reveals itself in new ways. Occasionally contrasted with concrete, his buildings cover the entire spectrum from smooth to coarse - invoking a phenomenal experience. One wonders how constraints of costs and resource, within a given social context, can bring about such an interesting phenomenological restructuring of architecture through a material that is otherwise constructs the mundane.
It is almost reductive of Baker, at various instances, to justify these diverse culturally multidimensional solutions as merely functions of economy or affordability. To make one's dynamic architecture be understood as so utilitarian seems to me an over-rational narrative that he may have prepared as a dose for political consumption of bureaucrats and people with low design consciousness. Was Baker doing so to "sell" his ideas? Rather, it was his challenge to make his design narrative so convenient to as to be accessible to common man. Perhaps he anticipated a possibility where the common man could participate in appreciating design if its language became more accessible.
Was poetry not appreciated enough in Baker's work environment for him to express in a narrative exciting beyond the utilitarian? His works exemplify poetics of space in the minute details and sensitivity to site. Without a doubt, Baker's sites did much for him - he was intelligent enough to locate his projects (in many instances) letting the landscape in the building tactfully. Baker's forms and spatialities do not speak of poverty. They are full of life and longing in their attention to human scale, gesture, all rolled into a minimal aesthetic. To a large extent, Baker begins to answer what Kahn asks profoundly "What does the brick want to be?" What architectural questions did Baker want to pose through his forms? What experiential structure did he create through his architectural endavour? What phenomenological openings do Baker's project invoke? These are questions that remain uninitiated in the scholarship on Laurie Baker by far.
Baker wrote numerous books on cost-effective construction techniques. Available to the common man easily, he often reduced for people building techniques almost like applicable formulae. This has become the primary mode in which we consume, understand and remember Baker today. While written as mere essentials of construction process, he never fell in the formulaic trap, constantly innovating and critically evolving his material conception of space. This fundamental split in the way we consume versus experience Baker's architecture has made us categorically leave out Baker in the mainstream modern architectural discourse. Further, in framing his buildings merely as "cost-effective" or "sustainable", we have foreshadowed the experiential aspects of his buildings to a large extent, reducing our focus merely to his use of material and techniques.
We are introduced to an extensive range of methods in which a set of bricks can be put together in moving through Baker's buildings. The manner in which surfacial textures are created merely by a variation in the way brick is twisted/moved and re-placed over one another opens up worlds of experiences (ref: The Smooth and the Striated, Gilles Deleuze). In structure and skin, the brick forever reveals itself in new ways. Occasionally contrasted with concrete, his buildings cover the entire spectrum from smooth to coarse - invoking a phenomenal experience. One wonders how constraints of costs and resource, within a given social context, can bring about such an interesting phenomenological restructuring of architecture through a material that is otherwise constructs the mundane.
It is almost reductive of Baker, at various instances, to justify these diverse culturally multidimensional solutions as merely functions of economy or affordability. To make one's dynamic architecture be understood as so utilitarian seems to me an over-rational narrative that he may have prepared as a dose for political consumption of bureaucrats and people with low design consciousness. Was Baker doing so to "sell" his ideas? Rather, it was his challenge to make his design narrative so convenient to as to be accessible to common man. Perhaps he anticipated a possibility where the common man could participate in appreciating design if its language became more accessible.
Was poetry not appreciated enough in Baker's work environment for him to express in a narrative exciting beyond the utilitarian? His works exemplify poetics of space in the minute details and sensitivity to site. Without a doubt, Baker's sites did much for him - he was intelligent enough to locate his projects (in many instances) letting the landscape in the building tactfully. Baker's forms and spatialities do not speak of poverty. They are full of life and longing in their attention to human scale, gesture, all rolled into a minimal aesthetic. To a large extent, Baker begins to answer what Kahn asks profoundly "What does the brick want to be?" What architectural questions did Baker want to pose through his forms? What experiential structure did he create through his architectural endavour? What phenomenological openings do Baker's project invoke? These are questions that remain uninitiated in the scholarship on Laurie Baker by far.
