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Alternative Building Materials: Timeless Mud
Written by Laurie Baker   
I have been very fascinated with the whole process of development in the
country since a considerable period before Independence when I first came to
India on my way to China in 1940 where I had been involved in leprosy work. In
1944 I discovered that there was an international organization looking for an
architect, engineer or builder to come to India because they had ninety-odd
homes or asylums for leprosy patients, which had to he converted into
something modern and new. I took on this job. Although I had passed my
examinations several years before this, because of the War, I had not had the
opportunity to practice very much as an architect. And here I was a starry-
eyed, young associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects, with the
whole of India to go at!

Home So I set off on my travels around India to see all these buildings that I had to
View or Sign Guestbook convert, and to my horror, I discovered they were miles away from anywhere,
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Search and most of the materials with which these buildings were built were totally
unknown to me. I had brought my textbooks along and thought I knew
everything, for after all, I was an associate of the Royal Institute of British
Architects! But here I was confronted with new materials like laterite, and
construction techniques like Madras terracing. I found very primitive materials
being used everywhere! I had a difficult first year, just trying to find out how to
go about things and what to do. I found the answers slowly and steadily and
strangely enough, not from my own profession but from the people themselves
and from the ordinary craftsmen.

Mud all the way

The thing that hit me in the eye, right from the beginning, was that an
enormous amount of use was made of mud! I knew a little about mud, but not
very much. The first thing I discovered was that mud is one thing in one place
and a different thing in another. It is used for different purposes and is used in
different ways! There are different techniques of sticking it together and
making it into a wall or whatever. This varied considerably, even sometimes in
a matter of a few miles, from one district to another. I began to move around to
find out how it had lasted so well, because many of these buildings that I saw
were as much as or more than a hundred years old. How was this possible with
a climate like India's with its intense heat, cold and the sery ;gong monsoon

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periods'? I discovered there were many materials that were mixed with mid;
very rarely was it pure mud straight eat of the ground. It was mixed with grass.
.straw, leaves and bhusa (chaff) I also found Ia very wide range of liquids
being used with mud to make it stick together to prevent cracks. I had quite
alarming experiences at times (and will continue to have them), throughout the
forty-five years that I have been practicing here! I saw that these additional
materials were changing as well. Nothing was static about this whole business
of using simple materials. I was very impressed with the mud-work in a
particular district that I used to travel through regularly. and as usual I tried to
find out why it was so good. There were no cracks although the buildings were
very old New ones were also being constructed in the same manner and all of
them were very well kept. But these people would not tell me what it was they
were mixing with the mannal to make it strong and stable. I thought it was
some sort of professional jealousy. They didn't want me to find out the tricks of
their trade!

But after several years of persistence. I discovered that pig urine was being
mixed. This hesitancy in telling me about it was just sheer embarrassment! But
why pig's and why not cow’s urine? We got hold of pig's urine and on testing it
in laboratories found that the urea content is very much higher than in any
other form of urine including cows' and goats' and human beings’ urine. Urea is
a binder and this is why they used it to make sure that the mud available
(which was of a slightly sandy sort) held together very well and it performed all
the functions that were required.

Empirical basis

I belong to the generation which didn't know what high technology was. Even
reinforced concrete was in its infancy when I was a student and if anything new
was being done in the area we would go about 200-300 miles to see it because
it was such a remarkable affair! The other thing I found about mud was that it's
used for all sorts of things — walls, floors, foundations and even for roofing
even doors, wall plastering Over cane and bamboo and mat material. It was
used extensively as a fire retardant. Though the CBRI has worked for the last
twenty years on fire retardants for thatch, in actual fact, this was already in use
by people using mud. In Africa and in several other areas, apparently they
build their round mud walls for their murals and before putting on the conical
wood or bamboo or grass or whatever form of roof, they pile grass stalks and
leaves inside and around and set it on fire and produce a mild form of ceramic
building.

In the Plywood Institute in Bangalore extensive research has been carried out
on compressed hardboards, sheets and coconut palm. The latter has some sort
of substance in it, presumably a sort of resin that is released at a particular
temperature, and by chopping it and hot-pressing it at a particular temperature,
it produces a shiny golden green substance — hardboard — which is water-
resistant, fire-resistant and acid-resistant. But of course, after the manner of
our research institutes, they are not there to promote its use, or to make use of
it. It is handed over to an entrepreneur who makes a little bit of it, sells it at
about three times the cost of marine ply — no takers — and, of course, he has
the right to it over a certain number of years. And there it lies, unused, not
available for any one else. So there are other factors in this whole business of
evolution, of growing, of developing our old original basic materials that
sometimes pose problems that prevent our using them.

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Before we came along with our high technologies and our science, people over
thousands of years were doing what we are now pleased to call research and
development. Anywhere you go in India, any village, any rural area (and
remember, there is still over 80 per cent of the population in rural areas and
their needs are 80 per cent of the needs of the nation), there is this, `rural'
design that is steadily going on, and this research is not something that was
thought out suddenly. They did not have research institutes. It was a system of
trial and error — an empirical form of development. People have used what is
actually underneath them and around them: the earth, the things that they can
pull out of the earth and so on. They used simple materials to protect
themselves from the rain, sun, animals, insects and other human beings. They
had very primitive forms of transport, and there was never any thought of
importing materials, all of which has resulted in this very distinctive
architecture. I insist on calling these 'rural indigenous designs' for building. I
think they're very fine examples of pure architecture because they use
materials honestly and straightforwardly in an enormous variety of ways, and
find solutions to all the problems we human beings have, living in a somewhat
hostile world.

Stone

The use of stone was also staggering. The methods of splitting a stone,
breaking it up for use.... I don't find it very much now, but in several areas in
the country, I found these huge granite boulders. Usually there were women
and children who would just sit hammering away, making a row of holes all the
way across a slab. Then they would hammer in dry wooden pegs. At the CBRI,
a stone block has been developed to use up all the waste stone. Two or three
lumps in the mould, fill it in with concrete all the way around, and you have a
nice hardboard block with more or less waste material apart from the cement
and the concrete that you put around the stone. This sort of system is still used
and was used by our ancestors in different parts of the country in similar forms,
laying two planks of wood alongside, filling the space between with stone and
ramming it with mud which has some additive or some form of reinforcement.
In the Himalaya there is a beautiful slaty sort of stone. Either it was used in dry
form without any mortar, or with a mud mortar. In an earthquake zone in the
Himalaya the whole system of building was with dry stone and mud — very thin
mud in between the stone allowed the slaty stones to move one over the other.
I saw no collapses of buildings at all due to the earthquakes. When the whole
area started to be developed with a capital 'D', concrete and cement came into
the district and these stones were neatly cemented together. This resulted in a
lot of cracking and damage during the earthquakes. So inspite of our
cleverness in getting higher and higher with our technology we weren't solving
the actual basic problem of the district.

The challenge of shelter

We have between 20-30 million families who have next to nothing to live under,
no form of shelter at all. We have another 50-70 million families living in
conditions that are very deprived — so-called huts or houses which are unlikely
to last very long. The questions which arise are: Why don't they use all these
simple techniques? Why don't they use the mud? The number of architects,
engineers, or contractors who build and design buildings in the country are
altogether less than one per cent of the number of buildings that go up in the

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country. Who's doing all the rest of them? Multiply a number like 20,000
houses by the amount of money that you think could build the lowest possible
cost house, and immediately you have vast astronomical figures that the
government obviously has not got or is not prepared to use to meet the
housing needs of the people. Can any form of technology that has been
devised yet provide a shelter of say 150 or 200 sq feet for a family to live in?
Are we just going to let ordinary people go 'mucking around with mud', in their
own way doing what they can? (And of course they're losing these skills more
and more). Do we, as a profession have any sense of responsibility towards
them?

What is an architect? Is he just there to design this 0.1 per cent of the
buildings, these high-rise buildings? I'm not suggesting that there is no place
for high-rise buildings and dams and five-star hotels which cost a lot of money.
The fact remains that they are a very small percentage of the actual houses or
building needs of the country. We can go looking for high technologies as
much as we can, but meanwhile, we have to get these 20 million families under
some sort of reasonable shelter. Do we know how to do it? I've just come here
from Madras, where NASA, the architectural students association of India was
having its annual convention, the theme of which was 'Shelter for the
Homeless'. A very large number of students were crying out: "We don't know
what to do!" "We've not been taught to cope with this sort of a problem! It is
there; we are aware of it. It is true we hoped to do this, that or the other. We
hoped to win competitions and we hoped to have big buildings, but we will feel
very uncomfortable if we don't do anything about the shelter problem." Now,
this is from young people whom we normally think of as being irresponsible
towards civic and social responsibilities. But there they were repeatedly
saying: "You are not giving us the education that we need. You take us to a
slum, it's the same slum everytime. They (the slum dwellers) are tired of us
going there and every time asking, 'How much money do you have? How many
children? What about water?' We make these surveys and then we do nothing
about them!" So I think it's not just futile to talk of mud and pig's urine and
thatch, etc. I think it's still relevant as long as we have these terrible
discrepancies from one end of the scale to the other. I think we are
irresponsible, even criminally irresponsible if we do nothing about it.

Viable alternatives to wonderful brick

As regards alternative building materials in the country, we do have those

alternatives in practice. We have mud and it's used in a hundred different ways
over the country. Those are the alternatives. We think mud is primitive. We
want reinforced concrete or something prefabricated or prestressed or
whatever it is. And we're continually working for substitutes, not alternatives.
All these materials had something in common. They were all almost totally
energy-free, other than the human energy of picking them up, mixing them,
cutting and chopping them, etc. Can there be anything more important than this
understanding of energy? I think brick is one of the most wonderful building
materials that has ever been invented. There are very good reasons that a
brick is a brick — its size, its shape... it's the amount of mud you can pick up,
the amount of mud you can pat into a little square, the amount of material you
can catch in your hand when you arc working up on that wall and the workers
throw up a brick to you. You can just catch it like a cricket ball! You can hold it
in this, hand while you put your mortar on the wall that you're already building
and then put it in place. You can't do that with a concrete block or a hollow

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block or any of the other blocks that we have devised. You have got to put your
trough down. You've got to get down, lift the thing up, get it on, and put it into
position especially when you're working at a height — in the second storey or
the third storey. The block is a very difficult thing to use, but a brick? No! And
you can use it for foundations, for walls, for roofs. I think the only thing I have
not used a brick for is the door and I'm determined to do it before I die! I'll
have. to find a client who is ready to let me do a brick door for him!

I have to think twice when I have to build a house — an ordinary 2,000 ft for
middle class/upper middle class persons, because I'm responsible for the
death of four large trees! In Kerala, all bricks are burnt by wood; we don't get
coal. It's too far away and transport is too difficult, so I have had to lay off
wood. What are my alternatives to things that bricks normally do? One of them
is stone, another of them is mud. The biggest problem that I have in using mud
is not with the mud itself, (I have done two-storeyed buildings with quite heavy
roof structures and so on, and intermediate floor structures with mud) but it is
the client: "We don't want mud", or "Mud? You mean to say I should build my
house with mud?"; "But you do understand, don't you, that in my position...."
This is the usual reaction of so many of our clients and we just give in and say,
"Yes, all right, if you don't want mud, we'll have brick." We don't tell a client
that he is going to destroy four full-grown trees to have his bricks. Are we using
our knowledge and our position and our professional status to suggest these
things and even insist on them with a private client, and these private clients
are probably only 0.01 per cent of the population? But the government? Do we
do anything about trying to persuade the government about the use of mud?
I'm not saying that mud is the the only possibility, but it is there. We have done
an enormous amount of research in the last ten years and even our
organizations are pushing the use of mud. But the prejudice against mud is
there. Any client that I suggest mud to —"Well, it's a very nice idea Mr. Baker,
very romantic, but no, I think we'll stick to something more solid!" and the thing
is brushed aside.

So should we architects assert ourselves some more and do we know anything

about the material? The really pertinent thing is: of all the members of the
various institutes of architects, how many of us actually have the knowledge? If
anybody came to us and said he wants to build a big house or a school OF
whatever it is in mud, would we be able to do it? Woqld we take on the job? I'm
often told that I'm trying to take people back to the middle ages or even worse,
but I think mud is still relevant. The usual question that is asked of me is, "It's
all very well for this rural India that you are so romantically inclined about, but
what about Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore?" I think it's still relevant there. I'm
repeatedly asked, "You don't have mud on the spot in the middle of Bombay or
Delhi, etc." But then neither do you have cement or steel on the spot. And that
is another thing that all these traditional materials have in common. Not only
are they energy-free, but they are also transport-free, or virtually so. They are
dug out, prepared, manufactured, added or subtracted to on the spot, meaning
a matter of a few kilometres over which you could carry them, either head-
loaded or by bullock cart. This is one of the very big inputs into the whole of
our building materials system these days — transportation.

We shouldn't forget our cultural heritage in architecture. We should not

abandon the use of traditional materials. It's wonderful stuff. A lot of it does
look decrepit; it gets worse and worse. But, on the other hand, you have got

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the answers to practically every problem of shelter we have in the country, in

this indigenous architecture.

© Copyright: The Baker Family, 2007. All Rights Reserved.

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