Birmingham-born Laurie Baker had served as an anaesthetist in China during the second world war, but it was a stop off on his way home that came to define his career. Baker — who had completed a degree in architecture in 1937 — was stranded for three months waiting for a boat in what was then called Bombay, now Mumbai, and it was there that he met Mahatma Gandhi. They discussed the need for hands-on architecture in the context of India’s widespread deprivation, and Gandhi urged him to return as soon as possible. In 1945 he did so. Over the next fifty years he designed and constructed more than a thousand buildings.
Many of those were created in Trivandrum, now Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of the southern, tropical state of Kerala, where he settled in 1969. Kerala is a region beautiful to behold, yet subject to extreme heat and monsoonal downpours. Isavasyam — a giant helical coil — was completed in 1998 and was the last house Baker designed before his death in 2007 at the age of 90. “He was much more than just an architect,” says Suresh, who commissioned the house with his wife Neerada. “He was a master builder, he understood engineering, he understood the climate and he knew everything about creating spaces and using materials.”
Although nearly 30 years old, the innovative construction of their home is a template for contemporary architects looking at how people might live in our era of changing climate, while allowing the natural environment to thrive.
Isavasyam consists of four levels, with an internal courtyard and a sculpted roof that channels rainwater into storage wells in the garden. The walls use a “rat trap bond” system, where bricks are laid to create a three-inch cavity — a buffer zone for cooling and insulation. As Suresh, a civil engineer, says: “The house is one big exhaust fan: hot air escapes through venting chimneys and natural draughts enter through jali [latticed] openings and windows.”
It was completed for one-third of the cost of conventional construction at the time. “It was our dream house, and it was all done so that the house could breathe,” says Suresh.
All Baker’s works were predicated on financial and structural frugality. “I learn my architecture by watching what ordinary people do,” he wrote, maintaining that this approach was always “the cheapest and simplest”. Baker’s houses relied on the most efficient and affordable systems for environmental control, today referred to as passive design. In terms of what we now call sustainability, he was decades ahead of his time.
Tropical Asia — stretching roughly from western India to eastern Indonesia — was a relative latecomer to industrialisation and urban sprawl, but from the mid-20th century the region’s rapid expansion, in tandem with global warming, has dramatically affected its own ecosystems.
The region is warming at nearly twice the global average and is increasingly subject to heatwaves and flooding. With the UN attributing 37 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions to the buildings and construction sector, the region is particularly sensitive to a cycle of building, demolishing and rebuilding. The populations of large urban areas in tropical Asia have more or less tripled since 1990 — and architecture and city planning must aim to minimise the environmental impact.
The Labri House, completed in 2021 in the central Vietnamese city of Huế, is immersed in a verdant environment, one that was embraced — and aided — by its architecture. Not that you can see much architecture: the house is tiny, set on a pocket of land hidden away on a tranquil lakefront. It is built from glass panels supported by a slender steel framework. Four transparent single-room volumes and their connecting corridors are curtained by vines.
The architect, Nguyen Khai, observes that the vines and birds and butterflies are as much at home here as the human residents. “When you see the house, you get the feeling that it has grown up randomly, so you are living in the plants and trees.”
Ng Sek San — a Malaysian landscape architect, engineer, designer and property developer — has devoted 25 years to assembling a series of houses and retreats known as “sekepings”. He adopts an approach of “reconfigure, renovate, recycle”, prioritising sustainability.
Finding kampong (village) houses — whose passive design means they stay cool without air-conditioning — that are due to be demolished, Sek San instead spruces them up and transports them to a rainforest site, where they are bolstered with lightweight steel pavilions that leave a minimal footprint.
Sek San is also dedicated to transforming rundown housing stock in Kuala Lumpur through recycling. “You can appreciate imperfection, where discarded elements become architectural features and where maximum impact [comes] from limited resources,” he says. “The only way to expand design in Asia is to make it cheap and affordable.”
In Laurie Baker’s adopted hometown of Trivandrum, Vinu Daniel founded his practice, Wallmakers. He has imbibed his forerunner’s philosophy and expressive form-making. Wallmakers has designed projects across southern India that combine architectural playfulness with a determination to reduce the carbon footprint.
The Nisarga Art Hub in semi-rural Angamaly, Kerala, was completed by Wallmakers in 2023 as both a family home and a performance venue for the musician occupants. It features unusual skylights that double as rooftop seating for a stage area, while its vast living space, looking over a paddy field, has bench-like shapes excavated from the floor. Yet it is distinguished not just by its geometric tucks and turns, but by its unusual means of construction.
Wallmakers builds through recycling — the walls of the house were created using a “shuttered debris wall” technique, where cement is mixed with all manner of waste material from the neighbourhood and soil collected on site. Daniel has been calling for a rethink in architecture in the face of the climate crisis. “In place of questions like ‘What should we build?’ we need to be asking ‘Should we build?’,” he says.
“It wasn’t called sustainable back then, I was simply being efficient and frugal,” says influential Malaysian architect Jimmy Lim. A 1992 property near Kuala Lumpur, for the brother of John F Kennedy’s press secretary Pierre Salinger, is raised on stilts and combines traditional Malay construction methods with a contemporary triangular footprint. “My architecture was expressive, but that was a manifestation of its functionality. And right from the start, I did not want to disturb the natural environment,” says Lim.
A similar approach is adopted by Boonserm Premthada of Bangkok Project Studio. His own home has been built using the residue produced by coal-fired power plants, shaped into handmade bricks — the unsustainable becoming sustainable.
Premthada says that his intention for the 2023 project, Back of the House, was to create “something that is not beautiful, but interesting” — a mischievous response to the uniform homes of an overbuilt city with 11mn residents. The house is deliberately ungainly in proportion and — with exposed pipework and mortar oozing from the brickwork — defiantly rough and ready.
In Australia, Phil Harris and Adrian Welke founded Troppo Architects in 1980, having conducted research across the tropical zones of the country’s north. The practice has four energy-conserving principles: the promotion of cooling breezes; ventilation by convection; reducing heat radiation; and sheltering walls and openings.
When their client Mike Rozak, originally from Seattle, realised he could run his software development business from anywhere in the world, he bought a large patch of arid land 50 miles south of Darwin, in the sparsely populated Top End region of Australia. It was the late 1990s. As he commented, drily: “There’s a lot of space here. You don’t feel crowded in.”
Although it is far from the congestion of Asian mega-cities such as Bangkok, the weather has similar challenges: it’s either very wet or very dry, and it is always hot. Troppo built Rozak’s home on a rocky ridge, and it stands in proud isolation. With an aerodynamic profile, it has an ephemeral appearance — most of its walls are simply fly screens — and it looks like it could quickly be folded up and moved, much like a traveller’s camp.
Laurie Baker set an extraordinary precedent. Yet his frugality was not virtuous so much as practical: frivolous design features can be difficult to build and maintain in searing heat and torrential rain, where many materials are liable to shift or be worn away.
Buildings function best when they work with, not against, their natural surroundings. But as the projects of practices such as Troppo Architects show, these principles of sustainability can be transported and modified — and have an ever-increasing relevance in the climate challenges of our times.
The Iconic Tropical House by Patrick Bingham-Hall is published by Thames & Hudson
Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
Leave a Reply