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Mango Mania Exhibition at Alliance Franciase Invitation pamphlet...click here
Mango Mania Exhibition: Online Gallery & Exhibition Details added... click here
Added downloadable links to Laurie Baker's Architectural Booklets.... click here
Photos of Baker houses/buildings needed.... to contribute click here

Have a memory of Baker to share with others? Write it down and send it in by clicking here  

 

Welcome

This is the official website of Laurence Wilfred Baker (Laurie Baker), renowned British-born Indian architect and humanitarian.

The site provides information about his life, his beliefs, his work and his architectural principles of cost-effectiveness, use of locally available materials, respect for nature, avoidance of energy-intensive materials and wastage minimization to create low-cost, beautiful, high quality buildings which long pre-empted modern concepts such as eco-friendliness and sustainable architecture.

Baker's body of work is significant both in terms of the volume and sheer diversity as well as in terms of the innovative and practical concepts he introduced. He has designed and built a dance village, computer institutes, fishermen’s huts, chapels and churches, factories, schools, film studios, orphanages, tourist resorts, residences, technical institutes, earthquake and tsunami resistant houses, leprosy homes, a Literacy Village, hostels, slum dwellings improvement, an ornithology centre, government buildings, a blind children’s international school and a museum. In Kerala alone, he has built over 2000 buildings. He has also done pioneering work into earthquake and tsunami proof housing.

Laurie Baker was also an accomplished cartoonist, artist and innovative designer. He has been at various times of his life an anesthetist, a nurse, a missionary and an architect. He served in the Second World War in the Friends Ambulance Unit and lived for four years in isolation in remote China taking care of lepers. After a meeting with Gandhiji he was convinced to come to India, initially as the chief architect of the Mission to Lepers building leper homes throughout India. He has since lived in Pithoragarh in the foothills of the Himalayas building hospitals and schools and in the tribal areas of Vagamon in Kerala before finally settling down in the city of Trivandrum.

This website is dedicated to the life and work of this truly multi-faceted yet unassuming man.



 





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