Ar. Laurie Baker - life and works Biography

1. “I never build for classes of people – high-
income, middle income or low income
groups, tribal or fishermen. I only build for a
Matthew, a Bhaskaran, a Muneer or a
Sankaran.”
- Laurie Baker
LAURIE BAKER
Presented by:
Muskan Batra
Niranjan Yadav

2. BIOGRAPHY
• (March 2, 1917 – April 1, 2007) British-born Indian
architect.
• He went to India in 1945 in part as a missionary and
since then lived and worked in India for over 50 years.
• He obtained Indian citizenship in 1989 and resided in
Thiruvananthapuram (Trivandrum), Kerala.

3. In 1990, the Government of
India awarded him with the
Padma Shri in recognition of his
meritorious service in the field of
architecture.
Baker studied architecture in
Birmingham and graduated in
1937, aged 20, in a period of
political unrest for Europe.

4. PRINCIPLES
 Low cost construction
 Use of locally available
materials
 Preservation and reusing the
resources

5. ARCHITECTURAL STYLE
Designing and building low cost, high
quality, beautiful homes
Suited to or built for lower-middle to lower
class clients.
Irregular, pyramid-like structures on roofs,
with one side left open and tilting into the
wind. Brick jali wall

6. Baker's designs invariably have
traditional Indian sloping roofs and
terracotta Mangalore tile shingling
with gables and vents allowing
rising hot air to escape.
Brick jali walls, a perforated brick
screen which utilizes natural air
movement to cool the home's
interior and create intricate
patterns of light and shadow.
Roofs

7. Curved walls to enclose
more volume at lower
material cost than
straight walls.
This saves construction
cost as well, since
working around difficult
site conditions is much
more cost-effective than
clear-cutting.
Curved wall

8. WORKS OF LAURIE
BAKER

9. o Laurie Baker introduced the rat
trap bond in Kerala in the 1970s
which had lower construction
cost, reduced material
requirement and better thermal
efficiency.
o It is a method of wall
construction, in which bricks are
placed in vertical position instead
of conventional horizontal
position creating a cavity within
the wall.
Rat trap bond

10. CHALLENGES:
• Severity of environment
in which the tribals live.
• Limitation of resources
• Dealing with large insular
groups, with set ideas and
traditions.
• Dealing with cyclones
FISHERMEN’S VILLAGE Poonthura ,
Trivandrum(1974-75)

11. DEALING WITH CYCLONES
• Low sloped roofs and courts serve
as
wind catchers
• Open walls function to dispel it
• Long row of housing replaced by
even staggering
• Fronting courts catch the breeze
and also get view of
sea

12. CHALLENGES
• Solutions of Computer Centre
design problems.
• Fitting in naturally and
harmoniously with
the elevations of the twenty-
five year old institution
COMPUTER CENTRE Ulloor,
Trivandrum (1971)

13. • Using principle of lattice wall
planning, breezeways & built of
natural brick & stone keeping in
consideration the electronic sophistication.
• He proposed a double walled building
with an outer surface of intersecting circles
of brick jalis.
• Space between two walls accommodated
the secondary requirements for offices &
storage
reas.