12/30/11

Today marked the beginning of class time and started off with an intriguing combination of urban and rural travel. We visited the Laurie Baker center and were introduced to COSTFORD. The nonprofit organization has built over 20,000 buildings (primarily homes) in India. The Laurie Baker Center was an interesting piece of architecture that was made up of red bricks and concrete. It was all open air, much like the rest of the forest located campus and full of interesting brick designs and even empty multicolored bottles imbedded in concrete to serve as decoration and the function of letting light in. The first speaker was P B Sajan who was very close to the late Laurie Baker, almost like a son. He discussed the various functions and jobs of COSTFORD and its purpose within Kerala. He also described various aspects of Kerala that separate it from the rest of India. The second speaker was Dr. K P Kannan who talked to us about the history of India and COSTFORD which I found to be very thought provoking and revealing. While they were both difficult to understand at times I enjoyed both presentations and still am interested in learning more. The last place that did was go on a tour of another campus that Laurie Baker had designed and built with COSTFORD. This university was very large and even included places for students and guest lecturers to stay. The architecture was very similar to that of the Laurie Baker Center and implemented many construction techniques that I remember using when I was a big builder of Legos. I took a ton of pictures and loved the setup of this place. Throughout the day we were provided with tea and fried bananas. This was not a new thing to me but the fact that the tea had milk in it and the bananas were fried with a batter kind of caught me off guard. Another thing that I found to be a little off about today was the snake pit in the middle of the campus that the Laurie Baker Center was located. This pit was just above the place where we ate lunch and was a little nerve wracking considering a campus building was only two feet away. Needless to say, India is home to a variety of poisonous snakes and I could not tell if Professor Jerry was joking or not when he mentioned that we should keep an eye out for them. 

Hopefully I survive and there will be more updates soon! The internet is inconsistent and I still lack the ability to charge my own computer so I'm going to be a day behind on posts until then.