7/25/2017 Laurie Baker : Architect's Official Website - Alternative Building Materials: Timeless Mud

Architect's Official Website

To be informed of upcoming screening dates of the film Uncommon Sense: The Life and Work
of Laurie Baker in your city and country, and to get notifications when the film and upcoming
Baker book are available for purchase please provide your email address. You will be added to
the Baker Mailing List. To request a screening email lauriebakerfilm[at)gmail(d0t)com

Enter Your Email Address

Type In Your Email And Then Click Here to Join the Baker Mailing List!

Alternative Building Materials: Timeless Mud

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!

So I set off on my travels around India to see all these buildings that I had to convert, and to my horror, I discovered they
were miles away from anywhere, 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

http://lauriebaker.net/index.php/work/architectural-writings/alternative-building-materials-timeless-mud 1/5
7/25/2017 Laurie Baker : Architect's Official Website - Alternative Building Materials: Timeless Mud

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 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 cows 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

http://lauriebaker.net/index.php/work/architectural-writings/alternative-building-materials-timeless-mud 2/5
7/25/2017 Laurie Baker : Architect's Official Website - Alternative Building Materials: Timeless Mud

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.

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

http://lauriebaker.net/index.php/work/architectural-writings/alternative-building-materials-timeless-mud 3/5
7/25/2017 Laurie Baker : Architect's Official Website - Alternative Building Materials: Timeless Mud

per cent of the number of buildings that go up in the 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 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

http://lauriebaker.net/index.php/work/architectural-writings/alternative-building-materials-timeless-mud 4/5
7/25/2017 Laurie Baker : Architect's Official Website - Alternative Building Materials: Timeless Mud

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 the answers to
practically every problem of shelter we have in the country, in this indigenous architecture.

http://lauriebaker.net/index.php/work/architectural-writings/alternative-building-materials-timeless-mud 5/5