Didi Contractor belongs to that rare group of individual architects in India that – despite all odds – forged a work life which clearly sets them apart from other professionals. In this small group Laurie Baker was the first to break away; in over a thousand structures he built in Trivandrum alone, he came to be known as the poor man’s architect. “A better building at half the cost”, he often said. Nari Gandhi, better known in Mumbai’s affluent circles as a design icon with unusual solutions to domestic architecture, practiced little but left an unusual craft legacy. Contractor built a sizeable body of domestic structures in Himachal Pradesh, working as much as a naturalist and ecologist, as an architect.
Lakshmi Swaminathan’s
A Call to Return,
Published by Banyan Tree (2024)
Yet Baker’s low cost, Gandhi’s craft, or Didi’s ecology – whatever differing outward perceptions their work held for the viewer and the user – their common single-minded struggle was the desire to express our greatest source of inspiration: beauty. It mattered little that Baker’s client was a poor fisherman family, that Gandhi designed a staircase for a shipping tycoon, or that Didi’s earth block construction and local stone work were painstakingly rudimentary. Every bit of labour that went into these buildings said with an unerring clarity that each structure was a generous gift to the eye, to the human spirit, and to the engagement with people and materials.
Contractor’s journey from an art school in Colorado, to a running practice in Mumbai, and to the final decades of her life where she spent building in the villages of Himachal Pradesh is lovingly recounted in a new book, A Call to Return. Edited by Lakshmi Swaminathan, herself an architect who worked closely with Contractor, the book is less a catalogue of buildings, and more a diligent record of innumerable conversations, her own and others’, that provide the guiding philosophy behind the architect’s life and work.
It is an architectural biography with a difference. Devoid of large double spread photos of buildings, the few blurry, black-and-white photos and detailed interviews on construction techniques, labour practices, waste removal, waste reuse, water catchment, recycling, ecology and ethics make an important moral case for architecture. What should be built, who should build, with what materials, and how. Doubtless the architect, who passed away in 2021, would have been very happy with the book’s unflinchingly honest content and humble production. Intensely personal, and true to detail, the book becomes wholly relevant as a frugal antidote to the exaggerated and excess-filled life we live today.
When Mahatma Gandhi said “The Indian house will be built of materials and skills, gathered within a 5-mile radius of the site”, possibly Didi was nearby listening, and added an equally useful line in Gandhi’s ear. “You need to know how to do what you ask someone else to do”. The innumerable houses completed over three decades in Himachal villages were assembled with local stone and mud blocks made on site, along with available wood, earth and bamboo, using local stone cutters and carpenters. Her creative process was utterly inclusive and labour intensive. “The work of preparing materials, digging, sifting earth, making and drying mud bricks provides employment to unskilled labour,” she said. And added, “a great deal of energy and affection goes into a building when people work together”. The book meticulously records ideas on construction, design, tradition, as well as notions on individual creativity.
In the gallery of current architecture, much of the work being built is profoundly abusive to local economics, environment and ecology. Building’s individualism today acts fundamentally against the dictum that ‘architecture is merely background to life’. Such an idea is anathema to a profession now coated with both, the burden of self-conscious design and the guilt of overbuilding. And in the larger scheme of things, becoming a profession that makes no significant contribution to the climate change debate.
At a time like this, any book that shifts architectural focus from big scale glass office construction to small mountain houses in mud and stone should be welcome. However, Contractor added more to her buildings than mere design – a new ethical and moral code, a more useful understanding of local material and craft, a broader inclusive view of ecology and conservation. And most of all, a gentle humour that gives just that extra touch of humanity and humility to her architecture. The book is a fitting testament to her generous sensibility.
Gautam Bhatia is a Delhi-based architect.
