Our environment-friendly home (inspired by Laurie Baker)

Read a tribute to Laurie Baker the guru of low cost and environment friendly housing in India in The Times of India this morning. He died at 90 in Kerala this weekend. Baker, a Britisher had made India his home for many years and even taken up Indian citizenship. Houses designed by him and made according to his architectural style were the hallmark of a typically Indian style borrowing heavily from the local architectural traditions and the local idiom and using material that was easily available and cheap. Our own house in Santiniketan - is in many ways inspired by Laurie Baker's techniques and his philosophy. My father had read up extensively on various indigenous architectural styles and had worked along with a local builder Udayan Sarkar in Santiniketan who in those days (early 1990s) was working with local building materials, styles and techniques in West Bengal.

The result was our home in Santiniketan which was very unique in those days and saved material and costs. Santiniketan which has grown around Rabindra Nath Tagore's vision of a global, educational hub, attracts a large number of Bengali intellectuals who have over the years built their homes in this heartland of rural Bengal. My mother's connection with Santiniketan was from her parents who had a beautiful family home there for many years. My grandmother was the grand niece of Tagore and my mother and her siblings had received their education at the Vishwa Bharati University. Coming back to our own home - my father took it up as his mission and it became an intellectual, aesthetic and physical exercise for him soon after he retired from his job. Among some of the environment friendly techniques that were used in our house was minimum use of concrete and rat-trap bonding - a technique that cut down on the number of bricks. The dome had a keystone to hold it and the house didn't use central pillars. Besides, local ceramic tiles were used instead of any fancy materials.

My father, who had just retired from his job, took up the mission of building the house as a intellectual and physical exercise and was involved with almost the laying of every brick. The group of masons and builders - who were specially trained in brick-laying - came from Murshidabad, a district in North Bengal and lived on our premises for several months while the house was built.

Today when discussions on environment friendly housing are very relevant, Laurie Baker and his work and life needs to be remembered and people around India need to draw inspiration from such localised techniques. My father - as always - was way ahead of his times. We had considered finding a name for our dream home in Santhali - the language spoken by the Santhals who are the ethnic group forming the oldest residents of the Birbhum district where Santiniketan is located as well as a large part of the Chhota Nagpur plateau in India. While we had toyed with Ausan - which means abode and some other Santhali words, my father, mother, sister and me never really reached a common word that we all liked. Today I can only think of my home in Santiniketan as a sacred space created by my father.