Among the last buildings Laurie Baker personally designed and built is a house in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, that winds around a mango-shaped courtyard. Yes, mango-shaped. Built for a retired bureaucrat at half the cost of a conventional design, the typically free-form dwelling is built in unplastered brick with a roof that spirals up around the courtyard. As you walk deep into the earthy dark of the living room you see what Baker liked to call the 'Coventry Cathedral effect': broken glass bottles built into the wall and glowing against the sun like a rebooted wall of stained glass. This is not the richness of experience you expect to find in the work of an architect who devoted his life to building for the poor.
展开▼
