Laurie baker

A documentary film titled, "Uncommon Sense: The Life and Architecture of Laurie Baker" has been completed and premiered at India Habitat Centre, New Delhi on February 4, 2017. The two-hour long film has been written, produced and directed by A British-born Indian architect, Laurie Baker was aptly described as, "Gandhi" and "God of the Poor." Laurie Baker graduated from the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design with architecture. He moved to India in 1945, and was initially a part of the World Leprosy Mission, which aimed at the conversion of once used asylums into hospitals which would shelter the people suffering from the disease. Mahatma Gandhi once told Baker that his knowledge of western architecture would be of very little help in India, where the rural areas needed more attention than the cities. Gandhi gave Baker his idea of building houses, saying that the materials needed to build a house should be acquired from within 5 miles of the site. This idea was to have a great impact on the architect's life a few years down the line. During his architectural career in India, Baker became renowned for building beautiful houses with local materials. These low-cost houses were aimed at clients from the lower class and the lower-middle class. To further spread awareness about cost-effective housing in India, he founded the Centre of Science and Technology for Rural Development at Thrissur, Kerala. The Government of India recognized Baker's outstanding contributions to the co...

As Head of Faculty at the Data Science Campus, I lead a team of four lecturers and one programme officer. Our team develops and delivers a range of data science and capacity-building programmes including a two-year training programme for graduate data scientists. We also develop bespoke programmes, working with national and international partners to help them to build their organisation’s data science skills. I am a data science lecturer at the Office for National Statistics. I am based at the Data Science Hub Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). My role is split between teaching data science and programming to international and national civil servants, working on data science projects related to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and mentoring data scientists and statistics advisors within the FCDO and in other countries. Rabies is a deadly and terrifying disease that exacts a heavy toll on human lives and national economies. For my fellowship I developed a non-separable space-time log-Gaussian Cox model in R-INLA to model the realistic space-time evolution of fox rabies spread. As part of my fellowship I spent 5 months at the Universidade Federal do Paraná in Brazil working with Dr. Elias Krainski. Introducing rspatialdata a website that provides a collection of data sources and tutorials on downloading and visualising spatial data using R. The website includes a wide range of datasets including administrative boundaries of countries, Open Street Map da...

Grandson to British-born Indian architect Laurie Baker and Elizabeth Chandy Baker, Bengaluru-based Vineet Radhakrishnan made the film “Uncommon Sense” as a tribute to his grandfather. He holds degrees from IIT-Delhi and INSEAD, France. After completing his MBA in 2013, and after much introspection, he decided to pursue his passion for filmmaking instead of a corporate job. (Right) Vineet with Laurie Baker and Elizabeth Baker, his grandparents; (Left) Laurie Baker and his wife Elizabeth Chandy Baker while on their honeymoon in the Himalayas in the Pithoragarh region of Uttarakhand. Elizabeth was a trained doctor, provided the villagers with medical care, while Baker worked on the design and construction of hospitals and clinics. They decided to make the mountains their home for the next 19 years and serve the community. Photo Courtesy: Vineet Radhakrishnan The raison d'être behind the film—which was four years in the making—was not only to document, but also to take forward the legacy of Baker. To make known to people, a more holistic picture of the man and his works—his beliefs, motives and approach to life that impacted and influenced his work, in turn. The campus for the research institute, Centre for Development Studies, is one of Laurie Baker's best campus designs, located in a residential area on the northern outskirts of Thiruvananthapuram. On the other hand, at home, he was laid-back and easygoing. Yet there were other areas where the architect and the grandfather w...

On Dec. 31, Laurie Baker took yet another step in her more than two-decade journey up the corporate ranks at Camden. The Houston-based apartment real estate investment trust (REIT) is one of the country's largest multifamily owners and a major developer of apartments, such as Camden Buckhead in Atlanta (pictured above) . Baker has moved into the chief operating officer role, replacing Malcolm Stewart, who retired after serving as COO and president. In the process, she has become the highest-ranking female executive in Camden's more than 40-year history and one of the highest-ranking female executives in the apartment REIT space. In 2004, company founders Ric Campo and Keith Oden asked Baker to become a regional vice president with oversight of operations — an often thankless role that is the backbone of the multifamily business. After learning about operations, Baker was ready for her next challenge in 2007, becoming vice president of fund and asset management. When Camden raised its first equity fund heading into the global financial crisis, Baker took a key role in fundraising and heading up the initiative, which gave her experience in the transactions side of the apartment business. After a decade in asset management, Baker moved back to operations at what would become another pivotal time, becoming executive vice president of operations at Camden in 2019. After a year on the job, COVID-19 hit, putting an unprecedented strain on onsite teams. But Camden’s operations tea...

Laurence Wilfred Baker is well-known by the name of Laurie Baker. He was a British-born architect who followed Indian traditional low cost and sustainable building techniques.He was the man, who combated India's inclinationto resemble the West by constructing impressive buildings out of sustainable materials- mud, clamshells and recycled bottles. Born in 1917, Baker graduated from the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design in 1937. He spent more than 40 years of his life in Kerala and became the famous Brick Master of Kerala. SURFACES REPORTER (SR) takes a glimpse into Laurie Baker’s life journey, his architectural ethics that were inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and the legacy he leaves behind. Also Read: The Method Laurie Baker was a humanitarian who did not believe in building for classes but for themasses. He said, “My feeling as an architect is that you're not after all trying to put up a monument which will be remembered as a 'Laurie Baker Building' but Mohan Singh's house where he can live happily with his family.” Laurie is acknowledged for his 'cost reduction' policy in all of his works, which is hard to see in modern-day architectures. He built houses, hospitals, institutes, slum dwellings, and government projects with low-cost construction techniques. Brick perforated wall at the Laurie Baker Centre .jpg He made a noteworthy contribution to architecture design and practice by creating buildings that belong to the soil, culture, tradition, and, most importantly, the l...

Nationality Indian Occupation Architect Awards Buildings School of Drama & Fine Arts Theatre (Thrissur), Centre for Development Studies (Trivandrum), Literacy Village (Lucknow), Website .net Lawrence Wilfred "Laurie" Baker (2 March 1917 – 1 April 2007) was a British-born Indian architect, renowned for his initiatives in cost-effective energy-efficient architecture and designs that maximized space, ventilation and light and maintained an uncluttered yet striking aesthetic sensibility. Influenced by He moved to India in 1945 in part as an architect associated with a leprosy mission and continued to live and work in In 1981, the Royal University of the Netherlands conferred an honour (the previous recipient of this honour, in 1980, was Hassan Fathy of Egypt) upon him for outstanding work in a Third World country. In 1983 he was conferred with an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) at Buckingham Palace. In 1990, the Early life [ ] Baker was born into a staunch During The War took its toll on Baker, and he was ordered back in 1943 to England to recuperate. But fate took a hand in delaying his departure by about three months as he waited for a boat in Bombay. During this time he stayed with a Quaker friend, who also happened to be a good friend of the Mahatma. Baker attended many of Gandhiji's talks and prayer-meetings — which eventually led to a more-than-casual friendship between them. This was also the time of the Gandhi-Jinnah talks and the height of the 'Quit In...

What strikes the eye at first glance are the curves... and the sense of breezy lightness which emanates from them, thanks to a series of small openings which provide ventilation to the interior—natural air-conditioning. The buildings of Laurie Baker, an architect from Birmingham (England) who spent the vast majority of his life in Kerala and eventually became an Indian citizen, intrigue and inspire a strange curiosity in the 21st Century. This Methodist Protestant, who passed away in 2007 at the ripe age of 90, was a pioneer of what is now called sustainable architecture. Baker was interested in limiting the use of reinforced concrete to its bare minimum since the very beginning of his career. Throughout his practice, he preferred to foreground organic and artisanal materials, eventually showing a particular affinity for terracotta bricks. Today, hordes of students throng the Laurie Baker Center for Habitat Studies, a set of studios in the forested hamlet of Vilappilsala on the hills that border Thiruvananthapuram, to learn from the know-how of the Master. On-site, enthusiastic teachers take blatant pleasure in transmitting the legacy of the so-called Gandhi of Architecture and his famed obsession with frugal methods. Pioneer Of Organic Architecture Long before the specter of global warming had started haunting people around the world, Baker saw the necessity of preserving nature by designing energy-efficient buildings. It is this which inspired the Double Skins and the op...