Sir Herbert Baker (1862–1946) was an English architect, remembered as the dominant force in South African architecture, with a Neo-Classical style that projected imperial strength and permanence. Born in Kent, he trained with his cousin Arthur Baker and at the Royal Academy Schools, where Edwin Lutyens was a classmate. In 1891 he went to South Africa, where Cecil Rhodes asked him to rebuild his house, Groote Schuur. In 1925 he was brought in to plan Nairobi, a plan controversial for laying out racial segregation. His last work, the rebuilding of Sir John Soane's Bank of England behind its outer walls, has weighed on his reputation ever since.
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The Pretoria Railway Station (1910) came in the same years as the Union Buildings in Pretoria (1913) for the new Union of South Africa: a 285-metre range of light sandstone with two wings and twin domed towers standing for English and Afrikaans around a semicircular court. In New Delhi he designed the Secretariat and, with Lutyens, Sansad Bhavan (Old Parliament House) (1927). The old friends fell out bitterly when Baker's Secretariat blocked the view of the Viceroy's House.
