The Basel Mission and the Mangalore Tile

Just beyond the city walls of Basel, on Missionsstrasse, lies the former Basel Mission House. Now a hotel, a garden connects previous Basel Mission buildings –a space that was once used to teach Missionaries-in-training to grow food now supplies the restaurant kitchen. The current hotel building houses the Basel Mission Archives, documenting a vast network of international missionary and trading activities. Over nine thousand kilometers away in Southwestern India, adjacent to the Netravati River in Jeppu, Mangalore, lies the Commonwealth Tile Factory. An obscure relative of the Mission House, Jeppu housed the first Basel Mission Tile factory and holds wealth of knowledge intrinsically linked to Basel. Missionsstrasse houses paper records, Jeppu is a living archive.

From Basel to Mangalore

Emerging from the earlier German Missionary Society, the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society(later the Basel Mission) was established in 1815 by Calvinists from Basel and Lutherans from Württemberg in response to the threat of invasion by Napoleon. Operating from headquarters in Basel, the Mission spread Protestantism throughout Russia, Africa, Asia and Latin America. Mission Industry developed to practically and financially support evangelism, resulting in founding the Industrial Commission in 1852¹ and the Basel Mission Trading Company in 1859². In South India, the Basel Mission saw providing employment as necessary to support converts who lost their occupation along with their caste through conversion. After failed attempts in agriculture, carpentry, locksmithing, watch- and clock-making, the Basel Mission found success in South India by mechanising existing trades: printing, weaving and tile-making. Basel Mission engineer George Plebst(1823-1888) saw potential in emerging terracotta roof tile-making techniques in nineteenth century Europe. He used observations of Indian potters’ tiles and Netravati riverbed clay along with observations of tile-making processes in Stuttgart and Schaffhausen and testing of South Indian clay in Mettlach,³ to initiate tile-making at Jeppu. Success of the clay roof tile Plebst developed with a local worker⁴ led to founding the first tile factory in Jeppu in 1865, which sparked initiation of competing tile factories in Mangalore, including A.Albuquerque & Sons(1868) and Rego & Sons(1871). Between 1865-1905 the Basel Mission established seven tile factories along the Malabar Coast, at Jeppu (1865), Calicut(1873), Kudroli(1882), Malpe(1886), Codacal(1887) Palghat(1887) and Feroke(1905). The products of these seven factories were used throughout India and exported to places including Burma, Ceylon, Aden and Basra on the Persian Gulf, the Strait Settlements, Sumatra, British Borneo and Australia,⁵ and used extensively by the British Empire, spreading the tile and its associated construction system across the Indian Ocean.

Building Production: Making & Breaking

The profile of the early Basel Mission tile provided a basis for development of the Mangalore tile⁶, which proliferated to arguably supersede the reach of Basel Mission evangelism. A combination of British building of public works in India and the mass production of tiles contrived to change social norms to allow roofing of buildings of various types with interlocking tiles, enabling a broad spectrum of people to use the Mangalore tile to build houses, railways stations, institutions and religious buildings. This disruption to the hierarchy in the use of materials played a key role in the rapid spread of the tile and marked a widespread shift from laying dense layers of materials(thatch and potters’ tiles) towards interlocking of elements to make a lighter, more durable roof. From 1865-1914 the tile industry rapidly expanded but growth in Basel Mission Industries was curtailed by the World War One Trading with the Enemy Act (1914, amended 1916)⁷ with Mission Industrial sites seized by the British from Basel Mission control.

The original Mission factories were planned as part of self-sufficient Christian communities abroad, but only three of the seven Basel Mission tile factories remain: at Jeppu, Calicut and Feroke. Encountering the factories in various states of use, disuse and demolition provoked us to document and build with the remains of the tile industry. Drawn documentation recorded the architecture of the Jeppu factory. The main building is anchored by a kiln, which along with brick piers, support a frame structure of steel and wood on the upper floors. Mechanics and structure are interwoven: the rotating belt shaft is held within the brick piers of the factory and the conveyor belt weaves between the primary structure to carry material, products and equipment throughout the factory. Since 2001 the factory has ceased production of tiles, but as of 2015 was producing hollow terracotta bricks. Drawing from the original factory tectonic, material experimentation led to building Office for the Commonwealth Tile Factory(completed 2019). The new office building aimed to provide an impetus to the factory and terracotta industry by housing the current staff and products and synthesising some of the ideas underlying the original factory.

Using an understanding of the factory as architecture, and its role in creating products for building, factory resources were used to make an environment comparable to inhabiting a clay pot. A bond consisting of a combination of solid and hollow bricks was designed to create an opaque external façade to prevent the entry of snakes, mosquitos, damp and dust, and factory infrastructure was used to make six new masonry bricks. Internal walls are selectively porous and opaque, with the voids spontaneously appropriated for hanging boards, pictures, clothes and storing rolls of paper. The walls use brick dust to make lime mortar, allowing the building to breathe, and the floors use crushed tiles as aggregate. Massive kiln bricks are appropriated for paving and lighting external spaces. The brick bond makes for thick walls with varied air cavities, creating a notable temperature reduction between outside and inside. Given the tropical hot, humid climate, this reduction is key to thermal comfort and eliminates the need for air conditioning.

The main factory building structure becomes increasingly lightweight as it rises, moving from the ground floor kiln and masonry columns to the timber structure of the first and second floors, permitting the rise of hot air to dry the products stacked above. Tapered brick walls wrap, enclose and house the processes and machinery within and counterbalance the upper floors. The new office takes cues from this tectonic by creating thick masonry brick walls, lightened by the combination of solid and hollow bricks. The rooms and water tower are set as blocks, acting like giant red bricks with voids in between. The blocks support a lightweight steel roof clad in the terracotta ceiling and Mangalore tiles - the previous livelihood of the factory.

Building worked in tandem with the salvage of products, tools and material from the rapidly disappearing factories. Between 2015 -2022 four demolitions in Mangalore contributed to developing a distinct vocabulary to experiment, build and reimagine the residue as new environments. Working with the messy demolition sites of once ordered spaces of industrial production, Talapady house(completed 2021) was built with chimney and kiln bricks from the Rego Tile factory(demolished in 2019). This married into a tectonic of a kiln as the anchor to the factory, to create a refuge from residue. Laying a table(mesa) with found objects, was a way to negotiate multiple times of labor, economy and spatial requirements of new programs - the space between “making” and “breaking” became tangible. Acts of repurposing rendered the old building blocks as suggestive puzzles in erecting of a wall or turning corners in within a tapering tectonic. Like designing a mould from scratch for the tile , the found remains formed a distinct language of contemporary practice. The spatiality of the configurations , from foundation to roof, for the brand-new house accumulated memories of kiln parts in the very essence of its conceptualization, in place, climate and meaning.

Reactivating Remains

Once no longer under Mission control the tile factories were stripped of their community-forming role. The absence of socio-evangelical purpose contributed to technological stagnation. As sources of local clay have been depleted and building material preferences shifted away from Mangalore tiles, the factories have become increasingly redundant. They are no longer a core ‘part’ of community life and building, but now ‘apart’ from city life, disconnected from the river that served them and the city that they served. Inactivity obscures the connection between Basel and Mangalore, Missiontrasse and Jeppu– and how reciprocity between places was instrumental in shaping the organizational, social and architectural form of the tile and factories, the constructions and communities they served. The Mangalore tile embodies local resources and a foreign evangelical vision, evident in building culture and the paper records within the Basel Mission Archives. In overlapping finding, recording and making, this work aims to bring to light the connections between places, material and meaning that emerged through a seemingly prosaic building material.