Lessons From a Dark Time and Other Essays by Adam Hochschild

Author:Adam Hochschild [Hochschild, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, Journalism, Social Science, Social Classes & Economic Disparity, Sociology, General, Political Science
ISBN: 9780520969674
Google: ohhfDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07DLT6FDL
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2018-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

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* As with many Indian cities, in recent years its name has been restored to its original form in the local language, Thiruvananthapuram.

THIRTEEN

The Brick Master

THE FIRST THING THAT INTERESTED me in the bold and unconventional architect Laurie Baker was my roof. During the five months my wife and I spent living in Trivandrum, the sweltering, leafy capital of the south Indian state of Kerala, the house we rented, like thousands of others in the city, was built largely of concrete. It would have looked at home as a row house in California. A flat roof lay directly above our kitchen, bedroom, and living room, and it was rain-proofed with tar.

Trivandrum is almost at the bottom tip of India, an hour’s flying time from the equator. After a few minutes’ walk in midday, you were drenched in sweat. Even people who had lived in Trivandrum all their lives complained about the heat. We were not the first visitors to India overwhelmed by this; one nineteenth-century British governor-general felt “as though one were passing through the mouth of a foundry.” But with this lunatic black roof soaking up the blaze of the tropical sun and then radiating it down at us like a broiler for twenty-four hours a day, it seemed as if we had gone from the foundry’s mouth into its flaming innards. Because of the roof, at almost any time of day or night, it felt cooler in the shade outside our house than inside.

We soon noticed that it was also much cooler whenever we visited friends living in the attractive brick homes designed by Laurie Baker, who although British-born has lived in India for more than fifty years. None had air conditioning, but some Baker houses had strange, irregular, pyramid-like structures on their roofs, with one side left open and tilting into the wind, to funnel it into the house. These seemed inspired by the air intakes on early steamships’ decks that funneled cool air below; I had never seen an architect do something like that on land. And unlike our rental house, Baker’s homes invariably had sloping roofs in traditional Indian style, with gables and vents where rising hot air could escape.

Gradually, I realized that the flat, black California-style roof on our house was not an isolated piece of insanity but a small example of a much larger pattern. In architecture, as in so much else, Indians want to be like us. But Baker’s work, most unusually, combined Western and traditional Indian ways. Furthermore, his great passion in life was not building the grand museums or concert halls by which architects usually make their mark but low-cost housing for the untold number of Indians who, quite literally, do not have a real roof over their heads. And on a subcontinent whose educated classes have by the millions emigrated to Europe or North America, Baker was that great rarity: a Westerner who had chosen to spend his life living and working in India. I was curious to meet him.

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