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Architectural Review, The, May, 2001 by Layla Dawson

LAURIE BAKER, MODERN MASTER OF VERNACULAR INDIAN WISDOM, RECOGNIZED IN WEST AT LAST; PRADA SETS PATH TO BE GREAT PATRON; LIBESKIND'S CHALLENGING STRATEGY FOR SS HEADQUARTERS; SAARINEN'S TWA TERMINAL AT JFK UNDER THREAT; BROWSER -- THE IRISH HEAD THE FIELD; HAVE BOLLES WILSON LOST SCALE IN THE NETHERLANDS?

INDIAN SUMMER

Laurie Baker is a remarkable person. A Quaker, he trained as an architect in Birmingham, England, and joined an ambulance unit in the Second World War. After serving in China and Burma, on his way back to Britain in 1945 he met Mahatma Gandhi in Bombay who convinced him that (unlike most Englishmen) he would have a role to play in evolution of the new India.

Baker returned to Uttar Pradesh in northern India to convert refugee centres into hospitals catering particularly for lepers. He worked for 16 years amid the poor in the savage Himalayan climate, married a local doctor, and developed a lifelong interest in indigenous culture and vernacular architecture. The Bakers moved to Kerala in tropical south India in 1963 where they built schools and leprosy centres for the poor, learning from the local vernacular as they had in the north.

Baker does not reject contemporary technology or modernism -- he just uses them sparingly, and achieves buildings which are spectacularly less expensive than ones erected by contemporaries who employ constructional and environmental techniques imported directly from the west. Like Gandhi he is a spiritual descendant of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and often works on his buildings himself. Devices like pierced brick or mud walls, timber slats (rather than glass) in windows, cooling pools, lime mortar made from sea shells, recycled materials and woven bamboo floors reduce cost compared with air conditioning and poured concrete (until recently, most cement had to be imported to India). Baker is one of the few Western-trained architects who really can build effectively for the poor, as well as making health and educational buildings for the state and houses for middle-class clients (AR August 1987, pp 72-75).

The range of his work is impressive, and the lessons it teaches are applicable to all cultures and a great diversity of climates. His modesty and (until recently) relative remoteness have rendered him largely unknown outside south India. At last, he is being recognized in the West, with an exhibition at the Architectural Association in London (17 May until 15 June). It will give a taste of the amazing riches of the Keralan work.

PRADA'S EXPANDING UNIVERSE

One of the more entertaining side-shows at this year's Milan furniture fair was an exhibition of work in progress for the Prada fashion empire by Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron and Kazuyo Sejima. Prada's patronage is characteristically astute and has been rewarded by a series of intriguing and provocative designs for stores in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco (Rem) and Tokyo (Jacques and Pierre) that attempt to redefine the boundaries between architecture and fashion. Herzog & de Meuron will also design Prada's new production centre in Italy and the firm's New York headquarters (in a refurbished piano factory), while Kazuyo Sejima has been commissioned to devise a modular design for in-store shops selling cosmetics and beauty products. OMA's in-house research group, AMO, is also tackling Prada's website.

Held in Prada's new Milan show space, a converted warehouse with a curiously graceful concrete structure, the exhibition presented a collage of drawings, material samples, posters, component designs, video tapes and slide projections, all exploring and animating the process of creation from initial generative sketches to full-scale mock-ups of facades and furniture. Distinguished by its liveliness and informality -- you could peer into models and pick up samples and components to compare textures and weights -- the exhibition brought the design process vividly to life. Parallel rows of large laminated glass panels or planks of wood supported by tubular steel frames were the only furnishings, their reductivist quality reflecting the industrial rigour of the surroundings. In the background, slide projectors cast changing images on to the walls and glass tables, providing a hypnotically rhythmic continuo to enthusiastically attended proceedings.

Koolhaas' lengthy theorizings about the changing patterns of contemporary consumption make him a perfect Pradaista, and his trio of stores investigate a familiar language of warped and folded planes, invaded by cunning movable storage systems. Herzog & de Meuron's Tokyo store will be enclosed in what appears to be a colossal structural net with diamond-shaped glazed panels, an imposing mock-up of which was on view. Sejima's contribution is more subtle, investigating flexible, modular storage and display systems infused with a spirit of fragile translucence that can be adapted to a range of different interior settings. Italy has an admirable tradition of architectural and artistic patronage and now that shopping has replaced religion, Miuccia Prada seems to have assumed the mantle of a minor twenty-first century Lorenzo de Medici. C.S. www.prada.com