It’s not often that a celebrity grandfather gets a tribute which itself becomes a matter of celebration. The late Laurie Baker, legendary architect who dedicated his life in popularising a native idiom in architecture, has received such a tribute from his grandson — a film that has been selected to the ArchDaily’s prestigious yearly ‘Architecture Documentaries to Watch’ in 2017.
Titled Uncommon Sense: The Life & Architecture of Laurie Baker , the biographical film made by Baker’s grandson Vineet Radhakrishnan is the first ever Indian film to be listed by ArchDaily, one of the most visited architecture websites worldwide with over 500,000 daily readers, 60,000 member architects worldwide and 160 million page views a month.
ArchDaily publishes the prestigious and much anticipated list of ‘Architecture Documentaries to Watch’ every year. ArchDaily includes three regional websites in English, Spanish and Portuguese. It has a partnership with the Pritzker Architecture Prize and was one of five finalists for the Best Online Magazine prize on Mashable's 2009 Open Web Awards.
Often called the ‘Gandhi of Architecture’, ‘Father of Green Building in India’ and ‘India’s Architect for the Poor’, Pritzker (Nobel Prize for Architecture) nominated British-born Quaker architect Laurie Baker had democratised architecture with his unusually simple, yet powerful, design ideas, making strong, green, beautiful yet cheap homes a reality for thousands in India who could never have otherwise afforded a house.
Filmed over a period of three-and-a-half years, the documentary covers both Baker’s remarkable life and also examines his socially and environmentally relevant building philosophies and how his radical, innovative ideas redefined the role that an architect and architecture can play in society. Uncommon Sense: The Life & Architecture of Laurie Baker is scheduled to be screened in several cities across India, and at numerous film festivals abroad.
