Sri Lankan architect who drew on his country's heritage to develop a vivid new style of building : Geoffrey Bawa remembered by The Times

architect/artist: Geoffrey Bawa
obituary title: Sri Lankan architect who drew on his country's heritage to develop a vivid new style of building
obituary compilation no: T-10
format: Text
date: May 29, 2003
appeared in: The Times/ Times Online
writer:

photo by:

courtesy: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article1073263.ece

Obituary Details:

Geoffrey Bawa
Sri Lankan architect who drew on his country's heritage to develop a vivid new style of building

Throughout its long and colourful history Sri Lanka has been subjected to the strong outside influences: from its Indian neighbours, from Arab traders and from European colonists. But these have always been absorbed and translated into something intrinsically Sri Lankan. Geoffrey Bawa continued this tradition. His architecture is a subtle blend of modern and traditional, of East and West, of formal and picturesque. He overcame the segregation of inside from outside, of building from landscape.

Geoffrey Bawa came late to architecture. After a brief career as a reluctant lawyer and rootless dilettante he seems to have stumbled by chance upon his vocation. Once aroused, however, his passion for the art of making buildings and gardens was allconsuming.

He was born in 1919 of mixed parentage (his Muslim father was a wealthy and successful lawyer) in Colombo, the capital of what was then the British colony of Ceylon. In 1938 he came to Britain to read English at Cambridge and later he studied law in London, where he was called to the Bar in 1944.

Two years of aimless travel after the war took him through the Far East and across the United States and Europe. Back in Ceylon in 1948, he bought an abandoned rubber estate at Lunuganga on the southwest coast. His ambition was to create an Italian renaissance garden out of a tropical wilderness, but he soon found that his ideas were compromised by lack of technical knowledge.

A cousin advised him to become an architect so that “you can use other people’s money to do what you like doing best”, and in 1951 he became an apprentice to the architect H. H. Reid. When Reid died in 1952 Bawa enrolled as a student at the Architectural Association in London, finally qualifying in 1957 at the age of 38.

He took over what was left of Reid’s practice in Ceylon, gathering around him a group of talented young designers and artists who shared his interest in Ceylon’s forgotten architectural heritage and his ambition to develop new ways of making and building.

The practice’s portfolio included religious, social, cultural, educational, governmental, commercial and residential buildings, and in each of these areas it succeeded in establishing a canon of Sri Lankan prototypes. It also became the springboard for a new generation of young Sri Lankan architects.

Two projects hold the key to an understanding of his work: the rubber estate at Lunuganga which he continued to fashion for almost 50 years, and his own house in Colombo. Lunuganga is a distant retreat, an outpost on the edge of the known world, a civilised garden within the larger wilderness of Sri Lanka which reduces the ancient rubber estate to a series of outdoor rooms invoking memories of Sacro Bosco and Stourhead.

The town house, by contrast, is an introspective assemblage of courtyards, verandahs and loggias that was created by knocking together a row of four tiny bungalows and adding a white tower which peers like a periscope across neighbouring rooftops towards the distant ocean. It is a haven of peace, an infinite garden of the mind, locked away within a busy and increasingly hostile city.

In 1962 Bawa’s courtyard house for Ena De Silva was the first to fuse elements of traditional Sinhalese domestic architecture with modern concepts of open planning, demonstrating how an outdoor life could be viable on a tight urban plot.

The Bentota Beach Hotel of 1969 was one of Ceylon’s first purpose-built resort hotels and combined the conveniences demanded by the package tourist with a sense of place and continuity that has rarely been matched: the main reception rooms were raised up on a rock and arranged around a central courtyard, while the two wings of bedrooms seemed to hover above the courtyard looking out towards the estuary and the ocean.

In 1979 Bawa was invited by President Jayawardene to design Sri Lanka’s new Parliament at Kotte. Politicians make impatient clients and the project was allocated three years from inception to completion. The practice worked from the outset with a firm of Japanese contractors and the building opened on time in 1982.

A swamp was dredged to create an island site at the centre of a vast artificial lake and the building now appears as an asymmetric composition of copper roofs floating above a series of terraces that rise up out of the water. Abstract references to traditional Sri Lankan and South Indian architecture were incorporated within a modernist framework to create a powerful image of democracy, cultural harmony, continuity and progress, and a sense of gentle monumentality.

Bawa also worked during the 1980s on designs for the new Ruhuna University in Matara, a project that enabled him to demonstrate his mastery of external space and the integration of buildings in a landscape. The result is a matrix of pavilions and courtyards arranged with careful casualness and a masterly sense of theatre across a pair of rocky hills overlooking the southern ocean.

At the end of the 1980s, when Bawa finally withdrew from his practice, friends thought that he would retire to Lunuganga and contemplate his garden. However, the break seemed to signal a fresh round of creative activity, and after 1990 he worked from his home in Colombo’s Bagatelle Road with a small group of young architects to produce a steady stream of fresh designs.

These included the Kandalama Hotel, which was built in 1995 around a rocky outcrop on the edge of an ancient jungle water tank, and the recently completed Jayawardene House, a minimalist pavilion on a cliff overlooking the ocean.

Bawa first received international recognition through the writings of J. M. Richards and Michael Brawne in the Architectural Review. Later he was championed by Jean Chamberlain and Christoph Bon, who worked tirelessly to organise an exhibition and book devoted to his work in 1986. Bon’s later book on Lunuganga is both a personal tribute to a friend and a beautiful photographic evocation of a garden.

Bawa was showered with awards from all over the world, except from Britain, though he remained a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects. This omission was partially put to rights by the Prince of Wales, who slipped away from the formalities of his visit to Colombo for Sri Lanka’s independence celebrations in 1998 to visit Bawa in his garden at Lunuganga.

Two weeks after the royal visit Bawa was struck down by a massive stroke which confined him to his bed for the remaining years of his life. In spite of this a small group of colleagues led by Channa Daswatte continued to work on the projects that he had initiated before his illness: an official residence for the President, a house in Bombay, a hotel at Kalutara. Each evening drawings and models were taken down the corridor from the office to Bawa’s bedroom for nods of approval or rejection.

Geoffrey Bawa, architect, was born on July 23, 1919. He died on May, 27, 2003, aged 83.

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