Geoffrey Bawa“Tropical Modernism”

The Sri Lankan Architect Geoffrey Bawa is now regarded as having been one of the most important and influential Asian architects of the twentieth century.

His international standing was finally confirmed in 2001 when he received the special chairman’s award in the eighth cycle of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, becoming only the third architect and the first non-Moslem to be so honoured since the award’s inception.

Who is he?

Bawa was born in 1919 and came late to architecture, only qualifying in 1957 at the age of thirty-eight, but he soon established himself as Sri Lanka’s most prolific and inventive architect, laying down a canon of prototypes for buildings in a tropical Asian context.

Although best known for his private houses and hotels, his portfolio also included schools and universities, factories and offices, public buildings and social buildings as well as the new Sri Lanka Parliament. His architectural career spanned forty years and was ended in 1998 by a stroke which left him paralysed. He died in 2003.

What did he contribute?

Bawa’s work is characterised by a sensitivity to site and context.

He produced “sustainable architecture” long before the term was coined.

He developed his own “regional modernist” stance well in advance of the theoreticians.

His designs broke down the barriers between inside and outside, between interior design and landscape architecture and reduced buildings to a series of scenographically conceived spaces separated by courtyards and gardens.

When did he start practicing?

He was educated at Royal College after which he studied English and Law, 1938, at Cambridge gaining a BA (English Literature Tripos) and went on to read law at Middle Temple, London becoming a Barrister in 1944.

Returning to Ceylon, after World War II, he started working for a Colombo Law firm. After the death of his mother he left the profession and soon left to travel for two years in 1946, going to the Far East, across the United States and finally to Europe and almost settling in Italy.

By this time he was 28 years old and had spent one-third of his life away from Sri Lanka. His plans to buy an Italian villa and settle down did not happen, and in 1948 returned to Sri Lanka.

On the on the south-west coast of the island, between Colombo and Galle, Bawa bought an abandoned rubber estate at Lunuganga planning to creating an Italian garden from a tropical wilderness. However he soon found that his ideas were compromised by his lack of technical knowledge.

When did he start practicing? cont…

In 1951 he was apprentice to H.H. Reid, of the Colombo architectural practice Edwards, Reid and Begg, whom he was the sole surviving partner.

In 1952 Reid suddenly died and Bawa returned to England and, after spending a year at Cambridge, enrolled as a student at the Architectural Association in London, where he is remembered as the tallest, oldest and most outspoken student of his generation. In 1957 at the age of 38 he returned to Sri Lanka qualified as an architect to take over what was left of Reid's practice.

Ink drawings produced for ‘Geoffrey Bawa The Complete Works’ Exhibition and Monograph, whilst working with Geoffrey Bawa in

Colombo, Sri Lanka.

His famous projects…

33rd Lane Colombo, 1960-1970The house in 33rd Lane is an essay in architectural bricollage. In 1958 Bawa bought the third in a row of four small houses which lay along a short cul-de-sac at the end of a narrow suburban lane and converted it into a pied-à-terre with living room, bedroom, tiny kitchen and room for a servant.

When the fourth bungalow became vacant this was colonised to serve as dining room and second living room. Ten years later the remaining bungalows were acquired and added into the composition and the first in the row was demolished to be replaced by a four-storey tower.

33rd Lane Colombo House.

The final result is an introspective labyrinth of rooms and garden courts which together create the illusion of limitless space. Words like inside and outside lose all meaning: here are rooms without roofs and roofs without walls, all connected by a complex matrix of axes and internal vistas.

If the main part of the house is an evocation of a lost world of verandahs and courtyards assembled from a rich collection of traditional devices and plundered artefacts, the new tower which rises above the car port is nothing less than a reworking of Corb's Maison Citrohan and serves as a periscope which rises from a shady nether world to give views out across the treetops towards the sea.

His famous projects…

Lunuganga, Bentota, 1948-1997The garden at Lunuganga sits astride two low hills on a promontory which juts out into a brackish lagoon lying off the estuary of the Bentota River.

In 1948, when Bawa first bought it, there was nothing here but an undistinguished bungalow surrounded by ten hectares of rubber plantation.

Since then hills have been moved, terraces have been cut, woods have been replanted and new vistas have been opened up, but the original bungalow still survives within its cocoon of added verandas, courtyards, and loggias.

Lunuganga, Bentota, 1948-1997

This is not a garden of colourful flowers, neat borders and gurgling fountains: it is a civilised wilderness, an assemblage of tropical plants of different scale and texture, a composition of green on green, an ever changing play of light and shade, a succession of hidden surprises and sudden vistas, a landscape of memories and ideas. The whole of it can be taken in with a brisk fifteen-minute walk, but it requires days to explore its every corner and appreciate its changing moods.

The End